As an ESL teacher in training at TC, I was taught to be as “authentic” as possible when giving a class. Teachers are supposed to provide students with abundant meaningful inputs under an authentic setting. By teaching “authentically”, teachers will provide the students with a context similar to the real life as closely as possible. This is especially important for me as an ESL teacher. Personally, I believe that “learning by doing” is essential to language learning. Students will get the hands-on experience in life-like classes, so they are very likely to be confident when they deal with the similar situations in their daily practices. For example, I was teaching abbreviations last week, and I started the class with showing them a picture of texting with my friend. I used a lot of abbreviations in that text, such as “LOL”, “idk”, etc. Then, I switch to a business email, in which I still used those very loose abbreviations, and asked my students what they thought about this. They rapidly realized what was odd there and we together made changes on those abbreviations to make the email proper to a business communication. Therefore, from texting messages to business emails, students got to know how to use appropriate abbreviations according to different formalities.
When it comes to online teaching and learning, the authentic instructions are even more important. Compared to in-person class, students have more flexibility, but at the same time, teachers lose part of control to the students on the other side of the screen. A funny example could be a student taking online class on his bed and falling asleep – that can really happen! Thus, this is where authentic teaching come to help! I will address two major advantages of authentic online instruction.
Authentic online teaching can boost students’ class engagement.
Students can get distractive very easily when having classes online. They may check their social media accounts back and forth or open multiple tabs for irrelevant contents, if the online course is given like a drill. However, an authentic context can save students from being bored and save teachers from being boring! An authentic class can effectively call to students’ attention because it is closely related to their everyday life, so they can relate and understand why that matters. Thus, they will be more likely to focus and engage in class.
Authentic online class encourages students to utilize resources to explore and solve problems.
In the authentic instructions, the questions brought up by teachers are usually ill-defined and open-ended. Students in a traditional classroom tend to work individually or collaboratively to figure out the answers. However, students in the online classroom can easily get more support from technology. They are not only able to rely on each other but also to access a large amount of comprehensible resources by simple clicks. It also works for teachers. For example, in my synchronous online class, I like showing the images on Google when the students are talking about something new or unique to the class, especially when they are addressing cultural aspects from their home countries, such as their customs and food. The timely visualization can quickly fill the information gap and make sure everyone is in the class on the same page.
April's Blog 