Employability skills

How does monitoring differ in the online classroom?

Monitoring is certainly more challenging in the online classroom as the teacher can't get up and walk about the classroom listening to the students. However, the same principles apply - teachers need to think about how they monitor, what the aim of the activity is, if they will intervene to help/correct students or take notes for feedback. 

Breakout rooms allow teachers to visit students working in pairs/groups and monitor attentively. 

Instructions

• An EFL lesson mostly consists of a series of exercises, activities and games which are connected to make an effective EFL lesson and help students achieve the aim of the class.
• To this end, it is important for EFL teachers to be able to give good, clear instructions in order to ensure that all the students understand what they have to do and can carry out the various activities.

What is the best way to help learners to understand instructions?

Boardwork

As a teacher, your board, or if you are teaching online, your screen and your slides, are a key resource and should enhance learning. Students need a good written record of what they learn and your boardwork will play an important role here. 

Teachers can use the board

• to present new language to students e.g. a new grammar point or area of vocabulary.
• to record new vocabulary and its key features e.g. word stress, particular phonemes.
• to share ideas and brainstorm.
• as a lead-in, the teacher can write a keyword on the board and then elicit ideas from the students.
• to encourage interaction by asking students to come up to the board to write something down; it could be a word in a brainstorm or a word they haven’t understood from a reading task.
• to monitor behaviour - writing the name of a student on the board to try and deter too much chatter.
• to score points in an interactive game.
• to use the board for a board race - a board race is an interactive game where the class is put into groups. They might have to write something on the board, spell something correctly or think of a past participle for a verb.