what are students' linguistic challenges in online class?

[namieamuro416]

Dear experts,
If i am going to teach online course.
What kind of challenges (grammar, vocabulary, discourse) will EFL learners encounter, especially in speaking and listening?

To me, i thimk EFL students are more likely to make erros during synchronous instruction. They have to respond others within a short period of time. There is no extra time for them to think good sentences or words to express their opinions.

*How abt for asynchronous instruction?

For the discourse challenge, most students tend to use flat tone to speak like communmicate with computer instead of taking to people.

I need more ideas so that i can design a computerized course accordingly!

Thank you~

[Namrata Arora]

Talking about courses, there are various websites which offer tutorials and classes in a Live setting. Besides being flexible and student- oriented, this mode of teaching lets the teacher discuss concepts with the aid of multi-media devices.
When I take my English classes online, I ask my students to speak and participate in the sessions. They post their replies in the chat box and speak into the mike.
Talking about Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation; I prefer showing them presentations, videos and documents from websites that are perfect in English. It's pretty easy to devise these courses and deliver results to students.
If you want to check out how I prepare these courses or classes, open wiziq.com and check out the 'Online classes' and 'Courses'. You can also search for IELTS and see the results. Hope this helps.

[imkimjeng]

I'm wondering whether you could provide much information about your target students and the orientation of on-line course. That would be helpful for narrowing down the focus of discussion. As for the instructional model, you could emply both synchronous and asychronous compatibly. The effects of the two models differ in enhancing student's listening and speaking ability. Synchronous teaching aims to increase learner's fluency while asynchronous instruction focuses on accuracy improvement. The problems in discourse should be encountered are suprasegmental features such as intonation, stress, and so on which varied according to context and speaker's intent. Misunderstanding would occur if learner are lack of prosodic knowledge. Therefore, instruction could include this part to raise awareness. With regard to grammar and vocabulary, the choice should meet with student's proficiency level; otherwise, difficulty word selection might overwhelmed learners while easy usages might bored them. Considering student's insufficient fluency, grouping or pairing would be alternative ways to cut down the time that individual student needs for delayed responses. Students in a group take turn to continue opinion expressing when someone gets stucked due to language problems; they also feel less anxious and stressful with peer's assistance in synchronous instruction.

[Carrierabbit]

In the context of synchronous class, students take more responsibility to talk because everyone is hearing very clearly. Any participant can provide instant feedback to others. Teacher can respond to students online just like in the classroom. Most importantly, synchornous instruction provides students to share their opinions with typing and talking. Even some students are not willing to talk on-line, they can choose to type instead of talking. (I don't know whether you are going to let your students type during the synchronous class, but I recommend to allow them to speak or type.)

When the teaching target of writing and reading, asynchronous instruction would be more appropriate than synchronous instruciton. Students need more time to read and response to teacher questions of the reading texts. Also, the benefit of asynchronous instruction is that teachers can post useful information on the discussion forum or blogs, such as commenting on writings or learning website.

In short, both asynchronous instruction and synchronous instruction include shortcoming and advantages. I think that the best instruction is to integrate both asynchronous and synchronous instruction in a class because each of them can complement the shortcoming of each other’s.