Adapting Approaches and Methods to Teaching English Online

Book excerpt: This book provides a framework for synchronous and asynchronous online language teaching. It elaborates on the key features of an online teaching setting, including the instructional media that are involved in it, their affordances and limitations, and recommends ways to adapt pedagogy to suit the online environment. To this end, the book draws on well-established language teaching methods that have been widely used in the physical classroom and puts them to the test by applying them online. This results in the emergence of an e-clectic approach that enables language teachers to be flexible and intentional in their online classroom-related decisions and combines good practices that cut across the broader methodological spectrum with personal teaching preferences, teaching style, and stakeholders’ specifications always considering the capabilities of the setting and the tools currently available to teachers and learners. The book enables teachers to be critical and reflective of their own online teaching practices and equips them, via analysis of live online language sessions, with the necessary skills to confidently engage with screen layout. It also addresses the prominent issue of adapting teacher and learner identity in the online context, and examines their respective roles in online language sessions in a holistic way, offering guidance and support for the practicing online language teacher.