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I am only in the beginning of my teaching journey, but I have already delivered more than 200 lessons of English online to adult learners. In my opinion, online format is convenient, engaging, and productive. And the lessons may be easily conducted with the same 3 steps of TEFL learning methodology ESA as in the regular classroom: Engage, Study and Activate. Online lessons are usually one on one lessons not group lessons. That is why a teacher can easily get to know each student and cater the topics of the lessons to their interests, hobbies, occupations. Each student gets as much of a personal attention of the teacher as possible during the lesson. Based on my personal experience, during an online lesson the teacher should monitor his or her body language, keep a lot of eye contact with student and smile a lot. Online lessons should be planned in the same manner as classroom lessons: warm up activities, new vocabulary cards, grammar exercises, games, communicative exercises. Each lesson should have a clear objective. For instance, we can imagine a potential plan for an online lesson introducing the second conditional construction for an upper-intermediate adult student. In the Engage phase a teacher could ask about student’s dreams about the future, or what would be different in technology, society and medicine in the year 2050. The goal is to warm up the student and to increase student’s speaking time. At this stage, student’s mistakes should not be corrected. In the Study phase a teacher introduces the construction of second conditional: using past simple tense in the if clause and would plus infinitive in the second clause. He or she can also give many examples. The teacher and the student could also do a couple of exercises using Word worksheets (could be send to the student via email), or a whiteboard where a teacher gives halves of the sentences and the student need to connect two halves into a complete sentence. The Activate stage can use some games and role play. For example: “if I were the president of my country”, “if I won a lottery”, “if I could be anyone, who would I be”, “if I could meet any celebrity”. The student should be as active as possible. The teacher could also prepare some songs, poems, or videos where second conditional is used. I think online learning can be as effective as offline learning. It is time efficient, interesting and useful. A student can be engaged, receive a lot of attention from the teacher and learn new vocabulary and grammar constructions. All that in comfort of his or her own home or office. The only thing needed it the computer or laptop. Motivation and desire to study increases, stress decreases. Student does not need to get to the lesson on time after work. It is easy to establish good rapport with the student, encourage friendly, relaxing atmosphere, that will facilitate the learning process. And most importantly online lessons could effectively use the same 3 pillars of ESA methodology Engage, Study and Activate. Online lessons have great potential and the demand for them will keep rising in the future. I am glad that I chose the online format for my lessons and that now I will have effective tools of TEFL methodology to deliver better lessons for my students.
