Community Through Technology: An Online ESL Instructor Toolkit

Fully online ESL instruction was a rarity in community colleges until 2020 when Covid-19 hit. Overnight, short-term instructional solutions were hastily implemented to move face-to-face classes online. While this was at first perceived to be a very temporary adjustment, as the pandemic endured, the perception began moving toward the other extreme: that online instruction would become the norm. Now, several years on, the general perception has settled in a place between these two, where we know we’re not going back to all face-to-face ESL instruction, and we know we’re not moving to all online ESL instruction, at least not anytime soon. This landing spot amounts to a lasting shift to online instruction for a large part of English for academic purposes language classes that are delivered at community colleges.

Most community college ESL instructors first learned how to teach online in that sink-or- swim moment in time back in 2020, but several years now have provided the time for reflection, experimentation, research, and study of the literature to arrive at a place where many ESL instructors, myself included, believe that, provided the right opportunities through the design of their courses and support from their instructors, EAP ESL students can achieve, at a minimum, the same level of English language acquisition in online ESL courses as they can in face-to-face ESL courses. And with careful course design, some, myself included, contend, they can achieve even more than in face-to-face classes.

In 2012, according to NCES, the percent of students enrolled in online courses across 5,908 postsecondary institutions was 25.5 percent. This enrollment increased between one and two percent annually until the fall semester 2020, where it doubled due to the pandemic from about 36 percent to 72.8 percent (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics). In fall of 2022, with the vaccine having been available for almost two years, the number dropped back down only to 53.3 percent, about where it remains today and where most expect it will not drop much more or will remain steady.

Higher ed administrators, often facing ongoing physical space crunches on campuses, see great value for their institutions in online classes since they require little physical space and space planning and because students can enroll in the courses from a wider geographical area. And now that students have experienced a world where the convenience and flexibility of online classes is commonplace, it is difficult to imagine the demand side subsiding a great deal.

This flexibility inherent in online courses is particularly enticing to many ESL students at community colleges, a lot of whom have a great deal of demands on their time outside of school and so can put that commute time saved going to and from physical classes to good use elsewhere. The challenges for online ESL educators are that students often don’t have a full understanding of how much of a commitment it takes to be successful in an online course, and the obstacles can be amplified in a language class, where interaction and active use of the language are key to acquisition.

For ESL learners, the online format additionally presents many challenges not faced by those taking online classes in their first languages, and this in turn presents the opportunity for ESL instructors to provide even more benefit to their students by design centered on connection and collaboration.

To begin, many language challenges are exacerbated in the online environment, where there is often a lack of (or greatly diminished) awareness of facial expressions and body gestures that, when present in face-to-face settings, can help guide students through the language acquisition process by providing context clues, non-verbal cues, tone and emotional indications, and cultural insights that can reinforce or clarify meaning and encourage interaction (Sailsman 2020). Many online courses rely on text, such as discussion boards, as the primary means of asynchronous discussion and communication. The lack of body language in this setting can also be especially challenging for those students who come from high-context cultures, as can the largely reduced level of body language in synchronous Zoom classes, due to the resulting diminished context that results.

In addition, writing is a more complex task than speaking, in terms of language production, and writing is more permanent in the sense that whereas a spoken error will be in the past in an instant, a written error in a response in a class discussion board is there for all one’s peers to see for as many days and weeks as the class is in session. While having time to compose one’s thoughts before participating in an asynchronous discussion can alleviate the language production anxiety many ESL students experience in a face-to-face class, this increased complexity and permanence of the written words can serve to inhibit a student’s participation and target language production, once again exacerbated for students from high-context cultures in the low-context, text-only space of a discussion board.

In terms of synchronous online class session participation, Al-Harthi found that the increased ability to “hide” in an online Zoom class and avoid participation can lead to students feeling less of a need to prepare before class and more comfortable with an approach of sitting back while others in the class take the lead (2005). Using the target language is key to language acquisition, so this ability to hide poses a great threat to online ESL learners’ language acquisition and the success of the courses and programs they are in. These risks can be mitigated with intentional design that brings students out of the shadows of the Zoom room and makes them more accountable to their peers and more intrinsically motivated to participate.

Negotiating cultural differences in teaching and learning can add additional layers of adjustment and challenge for ESL students. Students from collectivist cultural backgrounds can have a particularly difficult time navigating the high degree of self-directedness typical of most online courses (Tapanes et al., 2009). Instructors can aid these students in gaining optimal achievement in their online ESL classes by nurturing the students’ abilities to self-direct while also making course design decisions that minimize the individualistic components of the course and maximize the community of learners that support one another.

Given these challenges, the current and likely future reality that online delivery will continue as a significant part of EAP instruction at community colleges, and the overwhelming number of educational technology choices instructors have before them when designing their online courses, I believe it is critical for online ESL instructors to have tools available to them to make efficient and informed decisions as to how they may use technology to create the best opportunities for their students to be successful in their online classes. The aim of this project is to provide a framework for helping them to make those decisions quickly and efficiently.