20 APRIL 2018 – Sharing my experience in facilitating ESL adult learners from Bangladesh
In October last year, the unit that I am currently attached to has secured a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) and Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC). The MoA and MoU signed between UTM and UNMC has opened up the opportunity for international students from School of Education, UNMC to improve their language proficiency in order to obtain the required band in Malaysian University English Test (MUET). The learning takes place through face-to-face interaction and online learning in MyLinE portal (http://myline.utm.my) developed by my unit which is MyLinE Task Force.
As part of the agreement, MyLinE instructors are required to monitor and participate in an online forum to assist the students in their online learning environment. The facilitation runs every week and instructors are needed to spend at least an hour in the forum to monitor and participate in the forum discussion. After almost 9 months of facilitating the students in the forum, there are several points that I think worth mentioning here for my future reference and guide. Not to forget, the challenges faced when dealing with online learning.
- Navigation in the forum
One major aspect that I notice in the forum discussion is the lack of meaningful discussion threads in the forum. Not all but some of the discussions were not developing really well. I didn’t mean that all of the forums are meaningless or did not meet the objective of the activity. What I am trying to say is that, the way the students post and reply to other posts/threads could be further improved. This is especially true in Master Trainer Cohort 1 students whereby they tend to add a new discussion thread instead of replying to their friends. When this happens, it will certainly give a wrong message to the other students as they think that they only need to add a new discussion about their topic and leave the subject just like that. What we, instructors expect from the students is for them to be able to post and reply messages in an orderly manner. However, the students are not to be blamed as they received limited exposure on the use of the online platform compared to the other two cohorts who came later. Of course, came the second cohort, we gave more time for the students to familiarize themselves with the online platform. And it worked (though not completely). The percentage of forum and tasks completion from the participants in the second cohort is so much better compared to the first one although they have lower language proficiency. Our discussion becomes lively as there are more messages posted. More messages mean the students are doing well in the forum.
- Main idea is not clear / Content is not focused
There are also times when I encounter messages that are not well-developed. It is actually difficult for me to understand what the students are trying to say. It seems that message delivered is not clear due to poor language. However, I really appreciate their effort in posting messages into the forum. That what really matters. Also, it helps me a lot in customizing my content for the face to face teaching. From these messages, I can teach them the strategies in writing good content.
- Lack of coherence in writing and apparent spelling errors
Apart from that, I also notice that some of the students’ writing lack coherence and cohesiveness. Many a time, this problem hindered the students from writing a clear and well-developed sentences and paragraphs. And yes, there are also spelling errors committed by the students. By right, any spelling errors will be highlighted in red line but somehow I believe the students are not bothered to correct it. This definitely will influence the way they write on real papers. For example, the word nowadays. A lot of them wrote ‘now a day’. This error would be tricky to fix as the system would not identify those words ad being wrongly spelled as ‘now a day’ can stand stand on its own. This is something that I should be highlighting in class. I believe, if the students are taught on how to write cohesively, they would be able to deliver their ideas/messages effectively.
- Topic selection
In addition, I also believe that the topic/issue given in the forum can be custom made according to the students’ background. There is a topic that most students did not really participate really well. This is probably because the topic is not related to their culture or beliefs. For example, topic ‘Sports and National Unity’ did not have many discussions. This is probably because only Malaysians can relate to the two themes but not foreigners. This is partly due to to the fact that Malaysia is a multi-racial country whereby it is not for Bangladesh. Unity is a big issue in Malaysia but not to some countries. Thus, most of the students chose to not participate in the discussion thread for that particular topic.
Those are some of the things that I think I should reflect on. This is important for me so that I would be able to deliver effective content in my face to face teaching. If they are taught about these, it will certainly help them in their forum discussion.