David Berry, Kyunghee University, South Korea

When teaching in a class these days, students themselves (or caregivers, like parents) have safety paramount in their minds. This means that students may wish to minimize contact with other students. One manifestation of this is students not wanting to sit together but to sit apart (aka “exam mode”—sitting one desk away from others, room permitting). On the surface, this may seem like an insurmountable obstacle. This is because many EFL classes nowadays are all about helping students to develop the skills needed to communicate with others. One important element of learning to communicate is practicing the act of communicating. How can students practice communicating if they are reluctant to be close enough to communicate? It is time to reexamine how to communicate with others in an EFL classroom.

Groupwork

The first thing to think about is how to deal with groupwork. Many EFL teachers use groupwork throughout their lessons to facilitate communication among students. Groupwork has many pros but, now, one con: Students need to sit together. They do this to communicate with one another to solve a puzzle, come up with a solution, or negotiate something.

One way to continue using groupwork is by having students communicate from a distance using their mobile phones. Ideally, students will use earbuds to prevent feedback or background echoing. Apps abound to do this with either text chat or video chat: Google Hangouts, KakaoTalk Chat, Naver Line, and so on. One advantage of using these apps for groupwork is that the teacher can keep a record of the student chatting texts.

Another is that research has shown that even texting can help with skill-building of language students; specifically, Blake’s (2009) study looked at how different kinds of teaching arrangements impacted students’ oral fluency improvement. The study compared three classes of university ESL students in three different class configurations: practice speaking using internet text chatroom only, practice speaking face-to-face only, and practice speaking without any interaction. The results showed that the internet chat class significantly outperformed the face-to-face and no interaction classes in oral fluency gains.

Mobile Games

The second way to mitigate risk in the classroom and keep students happily engaged is through the use of mobile games. One example of an EFL classroom-friendly mobile game is Spaceteam ESL. This game is built to enhance many language skills: listening fluency, oral fluency, oral reading fluency, and even vocabulary development. Groups do not need to sit face-to-face or huddle together to play this game. It can be downloaded for free from Google Play or Apple Play store.

I hope these suggestions were helpful and they bring more lively dynamics to your class in the face of these virus threats.

Reference

Blake, C. (2009). Potential of text‐based internet chats for improving oral fluency in a second language. The Modern Language Journal, 93(2), 227–240.