Teaching Languages Online (review)

Although many language teachers are increasingly being asked to teach online, they have few frameworks available that adapt theories of language pedagogy to an online environment in a principled fashion. Carla Meskill and Natasha Anthony's Teaching Languages Online attempts to fill this need with a practical guidebook structured around a fundamental aspect of teaching: the instructional conversation (Tharp, 1993). The authors adapt Tharp's notion to include familiar language teaching techniques: 'calling attention to forms/lexis,' 'corralling,' 'saturating,' 'using linguistic traps,' 'modelling,' and 'providing explicit/ implicit feedback.' The authors then show how each of these techniques play out in four online venues: oral synchronous, oral asynchronous, written synchronous, and written asynchronous. Calling attention to forms in an oral synchronous venue, for example, may involve the teacher circling a concept on the shared online whiteboard while everyone listens to the explanation through headphones. While this may seem obvious, it may be the first time many new instructors have heard the concept of calling attention to forms, and possibly something of an 'aha' moment for experienced instructors as well. Unfortunately for the book, some of the techniques do not really fit certain venues as well as other venues. For example, it is much more difficult to 'trap' a student into using a particular structure in an asynchronous venue because of the challenges of on-the-spot assessment within those venues; yet in the book, the asynchronous venue is given as much attention as the synchronous venue where 'trapping' would seem to be much more easily afforded. The authors situate the work in theories of instructional discourse (e.g., 'IRE' or 'Initiation-Response-Evaluation') and in socio-cultural theory, although there is not much discussion about student-to-student interactional possibilities in the various modes. There is also not much coverage of ecological theories from which the much used 'affordance' concept stems, or of computer-mediated communication and interaction theory. In fact, the book reflects a task-based approach more than anything. Still, the book makes no claims to be a theory primer, and it could be easily supplemented with more theory-grounded and critical readings in a Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) course.

After an introductory chapter situating the work as a whole, each chapter, based on one of the four venues, starts with objectives and definitions and then describes how each technique would play out in that venue. Often a technique involves liberal use of what the authors call a 'task toolkit' or a shared set of online resources, usually developed and presented by the instructor, to complete the learning task at hand. Although there are examples from many different languages, many are from Russian. Two short chapters, one following the two oral venue chapters and one following the two written venue chapters, discuss how the venues may be 'amplified via text and visuals.' In other words, these two chapters discuss how multimodality and other contextual features may impact online teaching and learning. For example, how noticing, saliency, time, accessibility, and familiarity are variable, and thus influential, in ways that face-to-face contexts are not. In some ways, it is as if the authors knew these discussions were necessary for a comprehensive treatment, but could not fit them within the techniques framework and so included them as interludes. Unfortunately, the chapters have no end-of-chapter discussion activities so the potential for these concepts to inspire more theoretical discussion is lost. In general, the end-of-chapter activities are sometimes difficult to decipher and poorly situated. For example, the first activity in the oral synchronous chapter asks readers to consider how each of the 8 techniques can capitalize on 12 given affordances of online venues. So for one of the 96 points, readers are supposed to consider how having a bit more time online allows teachers to call attention to form in oral synchronous environments, whatever that might mean. Unfortunately, there is no answer key to help readers determine the intention of the authors.

At its best, the...