Clearly the “traditional” activities of the classroom like asking and answering questions, putting the students into groups and so on are still highly relevant. However, using the technology makes new demands on the teacher in the form of dealing with a wider range of written text genres.
Reducing the Load for the Teacher
The most important skill for the teacher in commenting on student work in a VLE is probably the skill of survival. When students become really involved in the writing that goes on in a VLE, they may produce large amounts of text which it would be impossible for the teacher to read in detail. Skim reading strategies enable the teacher to cope with this mass of text, and these strategies have to show that the teacher has read and responded briefly to what has been written without necessarily making detailed comments. Since the idea is that chat, forum and emails are activities, it would be inappropriate to comment on details of language, just as it would be inappropriate to correct a learner who is in the middle of trying to tell you something.
Online written responses to student activity within a VLE and in a forum session and to students sending in written work for comment can become overwhelmingly time-consuming. There are however ways of lessening this load. The first essential is to train yourself to read and comment onscreen rather than wasting time and resources by printing out material and then reading and commenting on it in handwriting.
Documents written in Word are especially easy to react to relatively quickly, for example by
using different coloured typefaces,
outlining in different coloured backgrounds
or best of all using the comment function in Word which is demonstrated here
Stroking or provoking? The teacher’s or moderator’s language of response
The use of electronic tools also means that the teacher/moderator has to master techniques of writing in a wide variety of genres in order to respond quickly to learners’ postings. This includes bearing in mind that the reader is not necessarily physically present and that one has to be aware that the usual visual signals and body language of face to face communication are absent.
Some examples of language use for different purposes:
in chat sessions : Liked your comment Mari, but what about the point Jens has been making?
Longer responses in forums to stimulate discussion, or to carry forward discussions which seem to have reached a dead end:
Several of you (Jon, Mari and Unni) have suggested that we should use cars less and public transport more, but how can we make using public transport a more attractive option? Any concrete suggestions here?
to challenge and question the learners writing in ways which encourage rather than discourage:
You have made an important point Katrine when you say that immigrants need to learn Norwegian. Do you think this is enough to help them socialize with Norwegians, or could Norwegians do more to help them establish such contacts?
There is of course still a place for the traditional “pat on the back” teacher response, but if thinking and discussion are to be stimulated there is a greater need for responses which encourage and challenge the learner
Making the contact personal
Although general comments on discussions may be useful, it is important to address individuals by name when responding to them as this creates a feeling in the readers of genuine contact and interest. Those who have responded to a forum can also be named, in order to give them public credit for their contribution:
“Any responses/reactions to Kjersti’s suggestion that……..”
The question of language errors
Of course, the hope is that student responses will not be full of grammatical and spelling mistakes, but I think it advisable that they feel they are “talking” rather than composing an essay” (Bender 2003)
As a language teacher one tends to become preoccupied with language correctness and has an almost irresistible urge to correct mistakes. We feel that especially in the language used for pure communication in, for example, chat and emails, the level of activity of the learner is much more important than the level of accuracy. The whole question of correcting mistakes can be taken up later in the final processes of the production of a final document (student work which is to be handed in and assessed or published in other ways). In other words, we are not ignoring the importance of correctness, but are suggesting that correcting language in a piece of work in progress is self-defeating as it is likely to discourage communication and signal to the student that the reader is more interested in correct language than in the content. This is especially so because a lot of mistakes made in these written texts are the equivalent of words like er and um in the spoken language and are also very often simply typos. And no-one speaks “perfectly” the whole time.
This topic is also discussed here
Encouraging the “lurkers”
Levels of activity in a VLE are clearly visible, so that a teacher can easily identify students who are not contributing (“lurkers”). The VLE has tools which make it easy for the teacher to contact students and encourage them to take part in an online discussion, either by emailing them so that the contact is private, or by challenging them inside the discussion by saying something like “We still haven’t heard from Eva and Tom. What do you two think about what has been said so far?”
We hope to show in the sections on Chat and Forums that online discussions are a useful tool for producing a lot of individual language activity. Because of this they need to be practised through regular use, they need to be compulsory, and they need to be represented in course assessment, for example by including one discussion text in a student portfolio.
Students who are very passive in the face-to-face class may well turn out to be prolific writers and will also express feelings and opinions in an online discussion. So the face-to-face lurker often turns out to be extremely “talkative “ in writing. On the face of it this seems something of a paradox, but our impression is that when students write, even if they are writing for an audience, they do not feel the same inhibitions about making embarrassing mistakes.
It is also important for students to be made aware of the purpose of using discussions, and the teacher’s expectations. Trisha Bender calls online discussion (forum or chat) “an opportunity for bouncing intelligent, informative ideas off each other in a spontaneous stream of consciousness”. She has an interesting example of a distance course student who “lurked” because she felt she had to produce perfect text:
“She explained her silence by saying that she thought she had to write something very formal in the online discussion, complete with an outline and footnotes….once I clarified my expectations both with her and the rest of the students, the class positively exploded with responses from everyone.” Bender 2003,58-9.
