teaching English/learning digitalese

I had been worrying about actually making the leap into online teaching for a while, when I suddenly realised that with a little help from my friends and learners (to expand on the old Beatles number), I've been using online tools for ESOL longer than I've been worrying!  There's probably a moral in there somewhere.  Mostly what I've used has been email, such as for essay edits, but more recently I’ve been given a push into trying Facebook to encourage language learning. 

Email necessarily involves elements of technoliteracy as well as reading and writing skills, but it also requires knowledge of critical literacy and understanding of point of view - why are you writing this email?  Who is the email targeted towards?  Is it necessarily formal, or is a "Hi there" sufficient greeting?  Another social facet is the "netiquette" involved with email, for example not writing in all caps, the email equivalent of shouting (Tschabitscher, n.d.).  Email provides us with a range of educational directions to explore beyond reading and writing.

Although many literacy students I'm now encountering through Literacy Aotearoa aren't so inclined towards academic essays, email (for those so inclined) is useful for coordinating meetings and giving a small dose of new learning/review every day, provided by an authentic online situation.  But in my experience email creates an asynchronous form of conversation.  Two ways suggested by Karrer for partially overcoming this are with Twitter, although Karrer admits that Twitter lacks the depth needed for discussion, and online chat, such as Facebook.  I haven't yet tried Twitter, but from using Facebook (in this instance with ex-ESOL students and current friends from Taiwan) I discovered that the chat function gave us a very useful platform for real-time interaction, while also including other literacy functions found in email, including cultural literacy (“netiquette” as well as jokes and euphemisms) and critical literacy (“is this advice valid?  Who is giving it?”).

With a little English practice in the form of a few chat messages with a native speaker every day or two, one learner reported a gain in confidence when studying for his final exams.  The messages weren’t always in real time, so that reduced the authenticity and flow of the conversation, but the shortness of the chat messages allowed for a more relaxed approach. It was also less stressful for the learner than writing longer emails.

Working with ESOL learners has been beneficial to me.  They are often from highly digitally-literate backgrounds, and in the spirit of role-sharing, happy to share their experiences and expertise with their tutor.  It was the encouragement of students and coworkers that got me using Facebook in the first place!



http://www.facebook.com/

Karrer, T. (2011). Emerging asynchronous conversation models: eLearning technology. Retrieved August 4, 2011, from http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html.

Tschabitscher, H. (n.d.)  Email etiquette: 26 rules to follow. Retrieved August 4, 2011, from http://email.about.com/od/emailnetiquette/tp/core_netiquette.htm