Technical issues and the use of audio chat for teaching fluency

The primary constraint encountered during lesson observation was the technical difficulties that faculty and students had to deal with when they tried to use audio chat. Although students had opportunities to use audio chat in most of the lessons observed, on many of these lessons the use of the audio chat was hindered by

technical problems. It was common that one or more of the students in the class or even for the faculty to experience technical difficulties during the session (e.g. during faculty-led discussion of Observation 1, during the reading stage of Observation 1, during the grammar stage of Observation 3, during the grammar stage in Observation 4, during the reading stage in Observation 6, during the grammar stage in Observation 8, during the reading/pronunciation stage of Observation 9, during the lexis stage in Observation 10, and during the lexis stage in Observation 11). The following extracts typify the type of difficulties students and faculty experienced. One of the typical difficulties included students not being able to hear the voice:

The class now moves on to work on the reading text. A student complains about the voice. The teacher tries to fix the problem asking the student to let him know when the situation improves. The student says that he still can‘t hear well. The teacher tries to refresh the audio and video for all students, and then asks students if the voice is better now. The student says it is fine now. The teacher starts to read the text. (Observation 6)

The same problem also occurred in Observation 6:

A student complains about the sound. The teacher asks what is wrong with the sound and if the student can hear her. The student says that he can hear a noise. She apologises to the student and says it might be from the connection. She asks him to try to log out and in (the teacher communicates with this student using text chat and voice chat as the voice is not clear for him). (Observation 6)

A less common difficulty was related to students not being able to see what was written on the whiteboard. In Observation 8 two of the students in the class were not able to hear the teacher neither see the viewer:

The teacher gives (the student) the control and asks her to type the answers in the blank. He helps her with the spelling and praises her when she types the correct word. She is the only one who is working with the teacher. It seems that the other two students still have technical problems. The teacher

comments that the other two students in the class do not have audio or video, asking them to let him know if they can hear him. (Observation 8)

Another difficulty included the students not being able to use the microphone. In Observation 8, while working on the reading task, the teacher asked one of the students to read the passage aloud but the student did not seem to be able to do that:

Then the teacher asks (the student) if she can use the audio to read out. He gives her the microphone (the student does not read. It seems that he is not able to use the microphone). The teacher asks her to type instead. She types the answer and he praises her. When she finishes the teacher thanks her. (Observation: 8).

Other difficulties included the faculty not being able to access the online materials. In the following extract the materials website was very slow and it took the teacher about 5 minutes to access the website:

Teacher tries then to move to the next part of the material but the website is very slow. She waits for a few minutes but the page does not open. After about 5 minutes she gives up and moves to teach students from the additional materials. (Observation 3)

While on some occasions faculty dealt with the problems successfully, on other occasions they did not seem to be able to do anything about problems. In Observation 9 during a controlled practice exercise, three of the students in the class had technical problems. The teacher recognised the problem and commented on the situation, but did not seem to be able to do anything about it so he continued the lesson with the rest of the students in the class:

The teacher now is working on another matching exercise. These exercises are on tenses. This time students have to identify the tense of each one of the sentences. Teacher attaches numbers to the sentences. There are three students in the class now. Two students (W and S) do not have view port, audio and video. The teacher asks them where they are attending from. He comments on the problem then continues the lesson. (Observation 9)

The problems mentioned above regarding the use of the audio chat were due to a slow internet connection. Sometimes the difficulty in using audio chat was because students did not have the required equipment (a microphone) rather than to problems with the Internet connection. In Observation 3, two students were

nominated to read out the sentences during the grammar stage, but they were not able to read because they did not have a microphone.

The teacher chooses another student (Mu) to do the next sentence. She asks him if he has a microphone. The student says he doesn‘t. The teacher gives him the control instead so that he can drag the word to the right place. When he finishes the teacher thanks him (not all students have microphones with them). The teacher then nominates another student (K). She asks him if he has a microphone. He tells her that he doesn‘t. The teacher gives him the control and asks him to drag and drop the word to the right place. When he finishes the teacher asks him to do another sentence. While students drag and drop words the teacher shows them how to read the sentences with the right intonation (she reads the sentences for them). (Observation 3)

Offering students opportunities for communication is a key factor in successful language learning. It is commonly agreed that the use of the language is best learned through practising speaking. The importance of speaking in the communicative classroom is well documented in the literature according to the communicative approaches (Underwood, 1984; Hedge, 2000; Felix, 2004). In the online session, audio chat was not used for conducting speaking and fluency practice that helped students build their spoken communication skills. Rather, the pedagogic aim of using this tool seemed to be teaching pronunciation and correction of student phonological mistakes, i.e. teaching language as a system.

The issue of facing technical problems when using audio chat was mentioned by faculty and students as being the main difficulty that hindered teaching speaking. Teaching listening was also absent from the online sessions. However, it was a natural part of the faculty‘s activity in the sessions to talk to the students such as when giving instructions, dealing with student questions and requests for clarifications, dealing with technical problems, answering student questions about the exam, using the materials website, and giving students' feedback and going orally over student answers:

A student asks about the website and the faculty takes her through the website and shows her how to go to the main page and click on the right course, then use her username and password to access the materials. She suggests that the student add the link to her website. She clarifies things to another student who asked her a question about if they will take business English. (Observation 9)

On occasion faculty told students stories or anecdotes about their lives. On some occasions, faculty told students an anecdote about her daughter while speaking in English when she was teaching them grammar. On other occasions one teacher started the sessions by introducing herself, her interests, and her hobbies, and asked the students to do the same. When students listened to faculty during these activities, they were able to interact with them in writing and have some control of the discourse, just as in a real classroom. Students interacted with the faculty, for example, by interrupting, asking questions, giving a response, asking the faculty to repeat and clarify, and asking the faculty to slow down. In the following extract, one of the students asked for the teacher's permission to leave the session while another student told the teacher that he was going too fast:

The class is still working on the vocabulary section and they move now to an exercise on noun modifiers…One student complains about the teacher's pace. Another wants to leave. The teacher tells the second student he can leave, and tells the first students to ask any questions and to stop him whenever he feels he is going fast, or ask him to repeat. He asks the student if he would like him to repeat anything. The teacher then continues the lesson.

(Observation 7) 4.5 Faculty feedback

The role of the interaction that took place between teacher and students during this part of the lesson seemed to have pedagogic goals other than providing students with an opportunity for practising interactive listening. In addition, the opportunity that students had during the session to communicate and clarify messages and to negotiate meaning was limited to the use of text chat, which did not give students the

chance to take part in the dialogue as speakers. The following extract typifies how most of the communication between the teacher and students took place:

The reading text has four paragraphs. It takes the teacher about ten minutes to read all of them. When he finishes he tells students that it is a long passage and it is full of new words. A student agrees that the passage is long and other students type a question mark. (Observation 8)

In the online sessions the faculty played a supportive role in terms of facilitating the materials for students and providing them with explanations, examples, illustrations, follow-up questions, and other actions. Faculty and students worked together (in a plenary form) on the drill-and-practice exercises and received automated feedback from the computer, which was often followed up with feedback from the faculty. The analysis of the nature of faculty feedback on tasks in the online sessions suggested that while a variety of feedback types were used by all faculty, the general approach of giving feedback involved a strong emphasis on the inductive guidance of students as well as on understanding of meaning.

The first type of feedback provided by the faculty involved the use of a method more or less similar to the wrong-try-again model used in computerised interaction to correct student mistakes. In this case, faculty would either give students the correct answer immediately after they made a mistake or would wait for students to correct their answers after faculty indicated that their answer was wrong. The following two extracts illustrate each one of these methods:

He tells her that he is waiting for her answer. She types the answer in the text chat window. The teacher tells her that it is wrong and gives her the correct answer: "no …, not past continuous, simple past". (Observation 8)

What does incredible mean? Can you give a synonym of incredible? A student says it means "marvellous." The teacher says it does not exactly mean marvellous. A student says it means "unbelievable." The teacher says "very good." The teacher asks him to do another sentence. The student uses the control and chooses the form from the drop down menu. The teacher says that

the answer is wrong. The student tries again and he chooses the correct answer this time. The teacher thanks him (Observation 7)

Despite that this method of providing feedback was more or less similar to the wrong-try-again type of feedback used in computerised interaction, all faculty often provided students with feedback that went beyond this pattern reinforcement model provided by the computer, and that involved an inductive element where the correct/incorrect comment was combined with using cues, prompts, and guiding questions as well as other classic eliciting techniques to get students to discover the correct answer. What made this kind of feedback different from computer feedback provided through automated interaction was that it involved a focus on understanding of meaning rather than on the ability to "effectively imitate, memorize, and respond to a model dialogue" (Murphy, 2000: 5). This inductive-discovery approach in providing feedback was used by all faculty in the sessions observed and seemed to be the foundational basis of student-faculty interaction.

Eliciting answers was done by a combination of feedback techniques where students were not simply told that their answer was wrong, but were involved in a question and answer movement towards a specific conclusion. The following extracts show how a combination of telling students that the answer was wrong and then using the Socratic method of guiding and pushing them for the answer using elicitation techniques was used:

The teacher then moves to another exercise where students have to tell what teenagers are doing in the pictures. A student says that the person in the picture is trying to catch the bus. The teacher says that this is not the point (this is not what the person is trying to do). She asks them to pay attention to the equipment the girl in the picture is using. The teacher tries to draw the students‘ attention to this equipment (a skating board) by putting two lines under it in the picture. She gives the students this clue and then asks again: "Look at that, what she is doing? " A student uses sliding instead of skating and another student uses skiing to describe what is going on in one of the pictures. She tells him that there is a difference between "skating" and

"skiing". Then she draws two pictures for them using the whiteboard and the free handwriting tools to show students the difference between "roller skating", board "skating", and ice skating. (Observation 1)

Faculty commented on wrong answer then used a number of elicitation techniques where students were involved in a question and answer movement towards a specific pedagogic purpose. The teacher in the first extract told the student the answer was wrong, and then used visual stimuli where she drew the object on the whiteboard to elicit information to arrive at a meaning for the students. The teacher consistently commented on student's wrong answers, explaining why they were wrong and using further questioning to push the students for the verb she wanted. Eliciting and comments in the above extract was used in tasks that required a specific answer. Elicitation was also used in tasks which did not require a specific answer. The next example of eliciting is a little different from the examples given above in the sense that it represents the thematic guidance in a discussion where the questions were open and therefore did not necessarily have correct answers. The example demonstrates how, through a process of elicitation, the teacher managed the discussion towards the theme of the lesson, which was about teenager behaviour:

She introduces the topic for students: Killing time, and tells them that it is from unit 7. She asks students some questions about the topic: why do people kill time? She says that people kill time because they have a lot of free time. Students give their answers and comment (using text chat). A student says that he does not have free time. She comments on what he said and then asks: "why do teenagers have a lot of free time? " (Observation 1)

Eliciting and guiding students to a specific answer was sometimes done using clues. The following example illustrates how students were prompted to give the answer by giving them clues to help them find the answer:

Now they work on word number 8. The teacher tells the students that they should find this word in paragraph 2, article B. She tries to help them by telling them that the word is an adjective and it is used to describe something. The students type "flashy," the teacher says "well done, all of you. It is flashy". (Observation 10)

The process of eliciting sometimes was combined with a technique that included suggestions of an alternative utterance, expression, or form where the student answers were rephrased in a more appropriate form to improve grammar, lexis, spelling, and/or content. The following extract from a vocabulary task not only demonstrates another example of eliciting, but how correction of lexis was done using this technique of reformulation where student answers were rephrased in a more appropriate form to improve lexis:

The exercise is about compound words. The faculty explains the instructions and says that the students need to put two words together to make one word. She does the first one for them "energy saves". She asks them to do the second one asking "What else do we have with energy?" a student gives the answer "energy reducing" the faculty says "ok. What do you think of reduction? "What about reduction? (Observation 11)

While the teacher in the previous extract used reformulation to correct lexis, the teacher in the following extract during a reading comprehension task used this technique to correct content.

Students are given a text with a number of paragraphs which start with poor sentences. They have to say what is wrong with each of these topic sentences and to write a good topic sentence ….He refers to the ideas in the text which students need to include in their topic sentences, and then asks students if they can put all these details in one sentence. He underlines the ideas on the screen in red and gives the students about three minutes to write a topic sentence which includes all these details. A student (J) writes her sentence in the text chat window. The faculty praises her for the answer and then reads her sentence. He tells her that she can include another piece of information in the sentence. He includes this information to make a good topic sentence then he types the sentence in the blank. (Observation 6)

Eliciting answers from students was also done by giving students examples of how to do a task and then asking them to give examples. In one of the lessons in Observation 3, the teacher reminded students of the grammatical structures they need to use when they complain about irritating habits. The faculty gave students examples