Best Practices for Teaching Languages Online Recap

Thanks so much to expert language teachers Carolina Amoruso and Charlie McNulty for sharing their experiences and insights in our Teacherfest Webinar on Best Practices for Teaching Languages Online at Lessonface.  

Here we’ve briefly summarized important points from the information shared and topics discussed in the session.

What technology, equipment, environment, is needed for successful online lessons?

Much like with other online lessons, Carolina shared that good internet, web cam, microphone or headset and good light are paramount for teaching languages online. For students, she recommends having them join lessons on a computer rather than a mobile device when possible. 

Charlie concurred, stressing the importance of being professional in your setup so that communication can be as clear as possible.

What do you consider essential best practices for teaching successful online lessons? 

For Charlie, it’s important to consider what your students are interested in, and keep things simple and consistent.  Using extra technology and resources is great, but be aware of who you are teaching and if the complication is too much. Resources like self-created quizzes can be helpful as a warm up for students and gives teachers a chance to do an assessment.

Both Charlie and Carolina stressed that it’s important that the students are using the language as much as possible and it’s really important to have your time organized as a teacher to give each student as much time and value as you can. Charlie went on to say that fostering student engagement and setting clear objectives and goals for each lesson is crucial for successful lessons online. 

While a teacher should be as prepared as possible, Charlie posits the importance of welcoming collaboration and feedback from your students in order to enhance their learning, and establishing expectations and routines for lessons early on can help to build long-term success.

To establish clear expectations, having an outline that you share with your students so they know where they are, where they are going, and what your expectations are is helpful to keep students on track and motivated. 

Other best practices that Charlie uses include being sure to give brief, detailed feedback while avoiding blanket phrases like “Good job”, but instead giving specific examples in your feedback (e.g. “You did ____ well!”).

What optional extras would you recommend? For example, do you use apps, books, videos, or other resources to supplement live instruction?

Carolina likes to supplement her lessons with grammar books, video and TV series, songs and podcasts, language learning apps for vocabulary, and online games created through resources like Wordwall and Liveworksheets. When encouraging beginner students to watch a movie in a target language, Carolina prefers that students rewatch a movie they already know or children’s movie so that they already know the plot and can concentrate instead on the language being spoken, with subtitles as needed. 

While Charlie advocates for keeping lessons simple in terms of technology, and only adding supplements as required, Charlie’s favorite resources to supplement live lessons are Quizziz. Padlet, Curipod, and ChatGPT.

What are some challenges in teaching languages and how can these be addressed? 

Carolina relayed how it can be challenging to get students comfortable with speaking and creating their own sentences in the target language. Many are too focused on perfect grammar which inhibits them from actually using the language. In order to foster speaking more, Carolina suggests sticking to appealing topics (present tense verbs only, a summary of a movie, or a conversation where the student can put into practice topics from the current lesson, etc.) and to avoid overwhelming students with grammar rules. 

While grammar is important, Carolina finds it more important to create an environment where students are comfortable practicing using the language to make more progress in actually speaking while correcting grammar gently over time. She also recommends using visual supports where possible as pictures, a vocabulary list, or other prompts especially when incorporating new words into dialogue.

For Charlie, adaptation and flexibility are essential in lessons. It’s important to plan, but you may need to change things mid lesson to better focus on a more topical or weaker area. He believes that it’s important to take some time to reflect on the lessons you teach, both those that go well and those that come with more challenges to learn what you can do better next time as a teacher.

A particular challenge with teaching online can be student engagement as the home environment can be quite distracting for some students. In this case, Charlie recommended putting the student in the driver’s seat of the lesson so that they are more fully engaged in directing what they feel is most valuable to them at the moment. Games can also be a great way to re-engage students, but Charlie also mentioned the importance of allowing some time for productive struggle where a student is able to work through the current situation with their knowledge rather than stepping in too soon to provide answers as the teacher.

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Carolina Amoruso has been teaching Spanish, English, and Brazilian Portuguese in Buenos Aires, Argentina for 8 years and specializes in customized Spanish conversation lessons. Charlie McNulty is a special education teacher in Brooklyn, NY and teaches American Sign Language on Lessonface, as well as teaching English, ESL, Geography, Living Environment, US and Global History, Careers in schools.