New Literacies and language learning

32 thoughts on “What Interactional Competencies Contribute to the Effectiveness of Synchronous Online English Language Teaching?”

1. For online synchronous classroom interaction, teachers can use some strategies to facilitate it. Maybe the teacher can put up some questions related to students’ familiar topics then the students will be interested in answering these questions, which can create a positive learning environment for the interaction. Also, the teacher should provide consistent feedback on the student’s answers to encourage them to stick to it. Besides, teachers can provide emotional support to students to ease them for better interaction.

   • These are great ideas since SOLs are lack of physical presence. Therefore, the idea that teachers should try their best to give feedback or give interactive questions for discussion would be helpful.

2. Generally, I think synchronous online lessons raise higher requirements for teachers and the above three competencies are the crucial skills teachers should have in the face of online teaching.

   Technological competency is a basic but a must. Only when teachers know how to use platforms and their functions can the lessons go on smoothly. But it is also the easiest one to handle with. As long as teachers get enough exposure to such platforms, they can master them. Practices make perfect!

   Online environment management competency can be achieved by virtue of some platforms providing online classroom organization, just like canvas. During my undergraduate period, there was one semester in that we only provide online education. At that time, our university used Rain Classroom (雨课堂), kind of like canvas, in which teachers can set up different classrooms, assign teaching materials and homework, post some quizzes or sign-up and so on.

   As for online teacher interaction competencies, it really requires teachers’ skills to organize online lessons. Lacking face-to-face interaction, students may lose interest in staring at screens or easily be distracted by other things. As far as I am concerned, letting students open their cameras is a good way to enhance interaction and learning efficiency. If not, teachers must apply many different techniques to evoke their interest or attention like random roll calls or replies in boxes.

   • Totally agree with what you commented. And I also think that online teacher interactional competencies is the most challenging one among the three above-mentioned competencies. As for young learners’ online teaching platforms, I remembered some platforms created some small tools for teachers to give complements or praise to children, such as the button of clapping, stars or the sound of “Hurray”.Maybe this little tools can help teachers to build closer interaction with learners.

3. I think in the context of online synchronous classrooms, there is a great need to boost students’ engagement. Maybe teachers can use some online software’s features or functions to improve students’ emotional, behavioural, and cognitive engagement.

   BoardMix, for example, is a browser-based online whiteboard software for real-time multi-person collaboration. It supports uploading images, PPT/PDF files, multi-person online collaboration and editing, and access to Tencent meetings. The BoardMix whiteboard has an infinitely large canvas, with enough space for handwritten notes, which allows students to review what they have learned after class. This software is very user-friendly for interaction between teachers and students in online classes.

   https://boardmix.cn/

   • Thank you for your sharing~~~This is a marvelous platform!!! I just created an account on it. We can create our mindmap on it and share our documents, but not quite sure how to use them collaboratively ~~ Maybe you could show us how to take advantage of it in person?

   • Thank you for your comments, you made a valuable suggestion and strategy. All the competencies that we have mentioned in the blog that teachers need to master in online teahcing are aimed at providing more efficient and higher quality online courses, and active student engagement is one of the prerequisites for an efficient classroom that cannot be ignored.

4. If online teaching is an inevitable choice in the era of the pandemic, perhaps educational informatization will bring different views to us. While popularizing Internet education, we should pay more attention to the applicability of teaching in primary and secondary schools in poor areas.

   Previous experience tells us that schools should organize teachers to learn how to continuously enhance online course content and teaching strategies. Teachers should then be given systematic training to improve their ability to deal with the various problems that arise in their online teaching work.

   • I can’t agree with you more. Despite the prevalence of digital technologies, it’s impossible for all areas to have access to the latest tools. Maybe one of the important thing is to train up teachers to utilize any technologies at hand and improve their digital teaching competence.

   • Your comment got me thinking about something other than what we’ve been talking about in this blog. You mentioned that we should pay attention to the applicability of online courses in primary and secondary school teaching in poor areas. This is a question worth thinking about. Although the article does not mention how to popularize online education or conduct online education training in these places where it is difficult to access network technology, I think this is an inevitable problem to be solved in the future education industry.

   • Yes, it is quite necessary to consider the applicability of SOLs in poor areas, as students there may lack access to digital tools. I think maybe government should offer some financial help to them. At least, each school is provided with a digital tool which allows the students to listen to the classes given by teachers in some urban areas via Internet, which helps them to access more advanced learning resources..

5. I agree that online teacher interactional competencies are crucial for facilitating effective communication and interaction in an online synchronous classroom.

   One of the challenges faced by teachers in an online synchronous classroom is an increase in teacher talking time, which can lead to a lack of engagement from students. Additionally, eliciting responses from students can also be difficult due to technical limitations or social norms, such as students’ fear of interrupting teacher talk.

   To overcome these challenges, teachers must develop competencies such as establishing clear ground rules for interacting, utilizing multiple modes of communication (such as text-based chat, audio, and video), providing longer wait time, and developing specific questioning techniques that encourage students to participate and engage in the learning process.

   In summary, online teacher interactional competencies are essential for effective teaching and learning in an online synchronous classroom. By utilizing these competencies, teachers can facilitate a more engaging and interactive learning environment that meets the needs of all students, regardless of the learning setting

   • You are right~~ I think we all have the same experience of SOLs, in which there is lengthy Teacher talk time and fewer students’ responses. If SOLs are a trend for future teaching as an alternative to traditional face-to-face classrooms, I believe there is still a lot to improve in terms of the technical issues as well as teachers’ interactional strategies.

6. I always think that interaction is the most challenging part in SOLs. In SOLs, students are less prepared, more easily distracted and more unwilling to respond to teachers. And teachers sometimes are not skillful enough to use the online teaching platform. These, coupled with the unstable network, make it difficult for teachers to interact with students effectively and successfully. Three competencies mentioned in this article can be a good inspiration for teachers.

   Although the global pandemic seems to come to an end, I believe that in the future, SOLs will combine with traditional F2F lessons to achieve a better teaching effect. As English teachers, we should still improve our skills for online teaching.

   • Totally agree with you！I also find the three above-mentioned competencies really helpful in promoting interaction in SOLs. At least, they offer us some insights into how to facilitate online classroom interaction as a teacher and we may put them into practice to find out which one(s) is or are effective in the context of our own online EFL classes.

     Besides, I agree that although the Zeroing policy has been lifted in China, SOLs will remain a useful teaching method for Chinese teachers as it will sustain teaching when students have difficulties attending school due to severe weather conditions or other types of public emergencies that restrict social movements.

7. These three competencies are really useful and inspiring for both teachers and those potential future educators. Although covid-19 has ended, the ability to handle the digital tools which might be used in teaching is also necessary for every teacher. When doing online teaching, I think there are other issues should be taken into consideration. In order to conduct a more effective lesson, pre-training for teachers in advance is quite important. In this way, many problems caused by improper operation in online teaching will be greatly solved. And, this training is not only suitable for teachers, but also significant for students.

   • Thanks for commenting~ Appropriate training is really important to prepare teachers to use digital tools for teaching, which not only improves their work efficiency but also engages students with digital literacy practices!

   • thanks for commenting! I noticed that you mentioned that it is very important to pre-train teachers in advance. This argument is also one of the points we focused on in our analysis during the writing process. This is because with the advancement and development of technology and the popularity of online teaching, such training is important for both teachers and students, as formal training can equip them with the right skills to use various online platforms and technologies, ensuring that they do not fall behind and that they are able to sift through the myriad of online information to find the correct, credible and useful information to aid their learning

8. Interaction via synchronous online English teaching can always be challenging because humans, by nature, are social animals. Most people like to interact with and get to know others, especially in social settings. And although students get to interact with their classmates over Zoom or Google Meet, it is not the same as physical interaction. When I was the teacher, I met a student who really dislike the online class because he always feel that he was interacting with “machines”. Therefore, it is of a challenging task for teachers to make students responsive in online classes. From my personal experience, teachers have to make sure that students switch on their cameras while they are taking the online classes, and they will need to implement more dynamic teaching, with more forms of activities incorporated in class in order to make the class more engaging for students.

   • Hi Michael ~ Your comment is really insightful!!!! I have the same feeling. As teachers, we all have experienced such “awkward” or “embarrassing” moments especially when facing young learners, who are particularly energetic and kinaesthetic. Online lessons will not disappear due to the end of Covid-19 and teachers do need more systematic and creative training to master interactional competencies.

9. These three competencies are a good summary of the advantages of online teaching and its challenges, but I think it is also worth adding a point about the construction of the online environment.
   In 2022 there was an incident in mainland China where an online course was maliciously attacked and the teacher died of a heart attack after the class. There are many questions behind this incident: how can the psychological state of teachers and students be adjusted in the online environment? How can the online environment be optimized? How can such incidents be prevented as far as possible? There is still much room for change and improvement in synchronous online lessons.

   • I think the questions you raised are really constructive and deserve our careful consideration. It is reported that mental problems occur among students and parents during the Covid-19 when students take online courses at home. Students feel stressed as they are surveilled by their parents everyday and conflicts increase between the two parties. If online teaching and learning has to be a integral part of education, then more actions need to be taken to construct a harmonious online learning environment.

10. Online lessons do pose significant challenges to teachers. My experience in having online classes as an undergraduate made me realise that teachers should be employed with the competencies mentioned in the article to facilitate classroom communication.

    At that time, one online class, Intercultural Communication, was regarded as the most boring and the least motivated by some students, including me. The teacher just read the points in PowerPoint and rarely interacted with the students. In contrast to this class, there was another class called American Literature. The teacher was well-prepared, and the lectures on literary theory were more exciting and easier to understand. He would carry out some activities; for example, he once sang Hamilton to the class, which deepened our interest in musicals and activated the atmosphere. Even though it was an online class, we all listened carefully and tried to keep up with his pace and interact with him actively.

    • Wow, I recognized the essencial role that the teacher plays in promoting interaction in SOLs from the two classes you compared in your comments. You are so lucky to have such intresting lectures on literary theories, which I thought might be boring. So could you please share more activities carried out by the teacher or how he or she managed the class activities so as to involve more students in classroom interaction?

11. I think it’s important in online language teaching to make sure there is interaction between the teacher and the students. During the pandemic, I also took online classes for a long time. In many teacher-oriented classes, I honestly had a hard time paying attention and would often be absentminded or do my own thing. While in online classes with some teachers who forced us to turn on the camera, or assigned students to answer questions or interact, I was highly focused. However, this kind of class, relatively speaking, would appear mandatory, not flexible enough. Do you think there will be a balance between these two ways of online language teaching?

    • Thanks for your sharing~ It is a fact that students may feel demotivated and distracted in lessons that are completely teacher-centered with little interaction. And it is also a challenge for teachers to engage students in collaborative activities online due to various issues stated in the blog. Maybe the most efficient way to solve the issue is to train up teachers and increase their hands-on experience!

    • I do agree with you that it is necessary to seek a balance between the two ways of online language teaching you mentioned. One way I think may be effective is that teachers should give students clear requirements for online classes, like turing on the camera in class. And it is more important for teachers to be fully prepared for each lesson and try their best to design learning activities which can arouse students’ interest so that they are willing to get involved instead of being forced to.

12. Actually, flipped classrooms are instructional strategies where students can learn class material through all kinds of technology-based materials before attending class rather than in the traditional way, which should be handed in during class time. As a result, they have the chance to actively learn throughout class through a variety of exercises and applications, connect with their classmates and teachers, and then get quick, individualized feedback. MOOCs also play an important role in the spread of the flipped classroom. Before class， the students can use MOOCs to prepare. Numerous studies predict that the flipped classroom’s effects will be more pronounced than those of the traditional teaching method. What’ more, flipped learning in “English as a Foreign Language” classes has the potential to contribute to creating a communicative and student-centered learning environment. So I think when integrating the flipped classroom with synchronous online lessons, the teacher should prepare the activities in class carefully to ensure that every student can show what they prepare before class, and they should encourage the students to speak more so that it is a student-centered online class. In this way, students can be disciplined to prepare well before class.

13. I think online teaching as both an opportunity and a challenge for teachers. As information technology continues to develop, teachers do need to improve their relevant skills. Online teaching can make full use of a variety of video, audio and data resources, making it possible for students to access a wide range of information. At the same time, it can also break the boredom of traditional teaching. However, because of online teaching, teachers are unable to observe students’ reactions and active participation in a timely manner. This is why it is so important to design appropriate and interesting classroom content. Meanwhile, I believe that the establishment of a reward incentives should not be overlooked.

    • I can’t agree with you more. I think establishing a reward incentive that you suggest is quite helpful in promoting students’ engagement in online classes, especially for primary or secondary school students.

14. Well, SOLs just remind me my previous job as an ex online English teacher for extracurricular study. The difference is we used our only platform instead of video-conferencing tools, but the main competences are the same.

    Before teaching, we were trained to familiar with the platform, which boasted tons of buttons or functions. With the affordance of digital tools and multimodality, we designed lessons to attract their attention and exercises involving drag, match, vote, click, etc., which were suitable for the online learning environment. Frequent Interaction, like every five minutes a time, was necessary since learners were primary school students with short attention span.

    Of course, there were many challenges I had to handle, like the lack of real eye contacts or uncertainty of their knowledge absorption. These were especially hard for teachers who had not taught students face-to-face, just like me, cause for most of the time, what I looked at was the screen, the camera and the chatbox instead of real faces. I know the tips of teaching online, but with the knowledge and experience of teaching offline, it could have been better.

    Looking forward to more related studies about this field, which could guide teachers better.

    • Thanks for sharing of your valuable teaching experience,Lulu. I agree with you that for novice teachers who haven’t had any face-to-face teaching experience may find more challenging in SOLs. Also since SOLs are so much different from F-2-F lessons, as teachers, we need more further studies in these fields to equip us with practical and useful online interactional strategies.

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