ITAIS Newsletter - June 2021 (Plain Text Version)
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In this issue: |
TEACHING TIPS FOR AN ASYNCHRONOUS ITA COURSE
Introduction Teaching ITAs is a high stakes endeavor, but when delivering the course asynchronously for the first time, it can seem daunting. In the process of teaching an asynchronous ITA course in Fall 2020 and a prospective ITA student in Spring 2021, I learned how to navigate the teaching and learning of the ITA curriculum online, and in the process, this teaching experience was interesting and rewarding. While preparing the syllabus for the course, several important pedagogical questions became evident. First, how can the students develop their speaking fluency in a completely online course? Second, how do the students receive adequate and effective pronunciation practice and feedback? Finally, how will the students present their micro-teaching lessons, and how can teaching be effectively modelled for them in an online environment? Before answering these questions, I would like to introduce the ESOL Program at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). This program is housed in the English Department and serves as a post-admission program for international undergraduate and graduate students at this mid-sized university. The total Fall 2020 student enrollment was slightly over 20,000 students with an international enrollment of 684 students: 373 of which were undergraduate students (includes remote business students from a Chinese university), and 311 graduate students. According to this International Programs and Partnerships’ internal university report, the top five countries of origin of the BGSU international students were China, India, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Canada. The ESOL program offers graduate and undergraduate coursework in listening and speaking skills and academic writing. There is also one integrated skills course for graduate students and two graduate courses for ITAs (ESOL 5040 and 5050). Focusing more specifically on the ESOL 5050 course that I taught in Fall 2020, the course assignments include three micro-teaching lessons, listening assignments, pronunciation work, course observations, an instructional profile, homework, and other class activities or tasks. This coursework is delivered in the learning management system Canvas during a 16-week semester. In Fall 2020, three Chinese students were enrolled in ESOL 5050. Meanwhile in Spring 2021, a Sri Lankan student from the Department of Chemistry registered for the ESOL 6080 graduate listening and speaking course, but he also completed some ITA coursework in order to take the Spoken English Test (SET) at the end of the semester for his spoken English certification. Even though there were only a few ITA students during the 2020-2021 academic year, I gleaned valuable teaching strategies and tips for delivering an ITA asynchronous course. I would like to share these tips and strategies for teaching ITAs in an online environment. Each of the teaching tips begins with a reflective pedagogical question about teaching the course online and how I attempted to address it. Teaching Tip #1 As I was preparing the ESOL 5050 course content for an asynchronous delivery, the first question that I posed was How can the students develop their speaking fluency in a completely online course? In-person learning has a definitely much stronger advantage for developing students’ fluency. For online learning, I had to figure out another teaching strategy for students’ fluency development. One of the first curricular decisions that I made was to establish a weekly remote class meeting time. The students and I selected a 30-minute meeting time that was convenient for us in Zoom. This remote meeting was based on the teaching tips for online learning by Bowling Green State University business professor Steve Cady. One of the important takeaways from his weekly Zoom webinar entitled “Teaching Online Transition: Simple Solutions, Best Practices, Time Savers, Q&A, and Live Support" (March-May 2020) was to incorporate a weekly 30-minute meeting with the asynchronous class. Cady emphasized that a regular class meeting provides an effective way to engage and motivate the students with the added benefit of fostering a classroom community. As I discovered while teaching the ESOL 5050 course, there are other advantages of meeting remotely with the ITA students such as fluency development, student interaction, pronunciation practice, teaching praxis, instructor feedback, and answering students’ questions about the course content in the Canvas learning modules. Each weekly Zoom meeting with the ITAs had a fairly consistent agenda. We began with a small talk conversation about the students’ week, their courses and teaching assignments, or other interesting topics which were sometimes sparked by one of the student’s three-year-old daughter. This small talk activity created rapport among the students and provided them opportunities to improve their fluency, pronunciation, and listening skills. Following the small talk, other activities included a Zoom or Polleverywhere.com poll, a listening activity from online resources, pronunciation practice, or a teaching activity that related to the week’s learning content. A few interesting activities that the students completed were listening to Common Student Questions (ITA Program, University of Minnesota) and providing responses, describing how to do something, explaining a graph from their disciplines, and a tone game that practiced intonation and expression of different emotions in questions and statements. A remote class meeting gave us an opportunity to meet in person, discuss the course content, and help further develop the ITA students’ fluency. Teaching Tip #2 Another question that warranted reflection while I was preparing the ESOL 5050 coursework was How do the students receive adequate and effective pronunciation practice and feedback in an online course? Once again, in-person learning has definite advantages to student pronunciation practice and feedback. However, with the asynchronous ESOL 5050 course, I had to create online course content and assignments, whereby the ITA students could also practice, receive feedback, and make progress with their pronunciation. To address this pedagogical challenge, I used a combination of online pronunciation resources, ITA textbook resources, and my own pronunciation video recordings created through Canvas media. I video-recorded pronunciation feedback to the students in their assignments using Canvas media recordings. In our weekly remote meeting, the students also received pronunciation feedback from their peers and instructor. Altogether, there were six graded pronunciation assignments that covered topics such as word stress, thought groups, phrasal stress, intonation, linking, rhythm, vowels and consonants, -ed and -s suffixes, and key terms from the students’ disciplines. Each of these topics were first explained in the Canvas learning module pages. Some pronunciation content was a summary from their course textbook English Communication for International Teaching Assistants (Gorsuch et al., 2013) whereas other content was supplemented from Communicate: Strategies for International Teaching Assistant (Smith, Meyers, & Burkhalter, 1992). In the pronunciation assignments, I created Canvas video recordings of the assignment content so that the students could listen to them before recording their own. Online pronunciation resources were also utilized for listening practice such as The Color Vowel Chart and other digital resources for word stress, consonants, rhythm, phrasal stress, and intonation. Teaching Tip #3 The final pedagogical questions for online delivery of the ITA curriculum were How will the students present their micro-teaching lessons, and how can teaching be effectively modelled for them? Opportunities for teaching praxis were created through the Canvas discussion board assignments. Specifically, the students presented each of their three micro-teaching lessons via a discussion board assignment. Discussion boards enable class interaction and a classroom audience through student recorded or written responses. The students’ micro-teaching topics dealt with defining a term, teaching a process, and explaining a visual. They recorded their micro-teaching videos by utilizing Canvas Studio, QuickTime Player, or Zoom. After recording their field-specific lesson, they submitted the video file in the discussion assignment and within the same assignment, the students gave their peers audio or written feedback on their micro-teaching lessons. Incidentally, the discussion boards can be structured for a variety of assignment types. For example, I also used the discussion board for the listening assignments to facilitate student interaction, create audience awareness, and promote fluency development. For modelling teaching of the micro-teaching lessons for the students, I incorporated sample videos from ITA and YouTube resources in course listening assignments or weekly class meeting activities. I specifically selected video samples that modelled or prepared the students for defining a term, teaching a process, and explaining a visual. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Courseware: “The Use-Friendly Classroom” (Kemp, 2020) is an excellent resource for ITA teaching videos. Another great resource for defining a field-specific term by an ITA is Yen Heng Lin’s Monsoon Lecture (“International Teaching Assistant”). With these video samples, listening assignments were created that had the students identify and discuss with each other teaching effectiveness, organizational cues, pacing of content, speaking rate and volume, focal stress, and clear articulation. Conclusion Teaching an asynchronous ITA course is challenging, but with some creativity, it can render a successful teaching and learning experience for the instructor and students. I addressed some pedagogical concerns by establishing a weekly remote class meeting for promoting the students’ fluency development. For teaching skills development, discussion boards were a versatile tool for students to present their micro-teaching lessons and interact with each other. Pronunciation practice was provided in the learning modules’ content and assignments and the remote class meetings. References Gorsuch, G., Meyers, C. M., Pickering, L., & Griffee, D. T. (2013). English communication for international teaching assistants. (2nd Ed.). Waveland Press. “International Teaching Assistant.” (2017). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7nZoa8SBZI International Teaching Assistant Program (ITA), University of Minnesota. (n.d.) “Common Student Questions.” https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/120308/pages/common-student-questions Kemp, A. (Fall 2020). “RES.21G-001 The user-friendly classroom.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-S Smith, J. A., Meyers, C. M., & Burkhalter, A. J. (1992). Communicate: Strategies for international teaching assistants. Waveland Press.
Fernanda Capraro teaches in the ESOL Program and English Department at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. She teaches a variety of courses which include listening and speaking, academic writing, first-year writing, ITA curriculum, and graduate writing. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she taught prospective ITAs asynchronously. |
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