More and more English language teaching is taking place online these days in groups and one to one. Now the principles of teaching and learning remain the same across all contexts. But when we teach English online, new challenges arise that we need to deal with. And we do need to adapt the approach that we take in the face-to-face classroom to a digital classroom. People are studying in their home environment, in their living room, in their car. I had one lady working from her car, she wasn’t driving. On this course, Teaching English Online we’ll help you to understand how to teach an effective lesson online. We’ll begin the course by thinking about the market.

We’ll think about the learners that you might teach and what might be expected of you as an online tutor. The crucial elements of any online lesson are the teacher, the student, and a way to see them and hear them. Those are the basics. We’ll tell you about the equipment you need to get started and the platforms that you might want to use. We’ll also suggest resources and tools that you can exploit in and out of lessons. So you have to understand your platform and how it works before you start. And then ideally, you should have a practise with somebody else on the other end.

We’ll give you some practical strategies for developing a good rapport with learners and helping to motivate them throughout a lesson, because these things can be more difficult online than they are face-to-face. And we’ll give examples using teachers who are teaching online today. I build rapport with my online learners in very much the same way as I would do with a regular face-to-face class. So lots of encouragement and motivation and praise. We’ll also look at how we can help learners to develop receptive and productive skills. We’ll suggest different lesson structures for different types of lessons, and activities that can help learners to develop different sub-skills. Finally, we’ll think about how we can teach language online.

You’ll have ideas and advice on how to set context, how to clarify language and check understanding, how to give practise, and how to error correct online. Because there’s a distance between us, I think it’s important to try and get to know the learners individually as much as possible. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to transfer the skills you have in the face-to-face classroom to a digital classroom so that you can produce really effective lessons for the learners you teach and help them to develop their English skills.

A successful online lesson is a lesson where your student goes away knowing something they didn’t know at the beginning, or being able to do something they couldn’t do at the beginning. My name’s Lindsey Warwick and I’m a teacher and trainer based here in Cambridge in the UK, and I’d like to invite you to join our course Teaching English Online. I very much hope to see you there.