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![Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved]](/icon.gif "Post") Sat Apr 14, 2007 23:35 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Torsten wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | The market for online instruction is much smaller than that for in-person instruction, because online instruction is not as effective. |
Hi Jamie, why do you think that in-person instruction is more effective than creating a learning system that uses the Internet and phone? How many people can you personally 'instruct' at any given time? Doesn't 'instructing people' in person mean that you have to explain the same things to one person or a small group of people individually? While you are driving from one 'teaching' location to the next you could be speaking to a number of people online. Wouldn't it be much more effective if you recorded your 'instructions' and made them available for download or on CD? What exactly can you do 'in-person' that you can't do on the phone or through the web? Also, how do you define 'small' when it comes to measuring the market for 'online instruction'? |
Torsten, everything you say would be true if people were all standardized robots that leave a factory exactly the same, but they aren't.
One-on-one instruction in person is more effective partly because the instructor can taper the material to the weaknesses, knowledge gaps and temperament of each student. Even if students are at almost exactly the same level, they may have completely different strengths and weaknesses. One guy may have learned most of his vocabulary from reading spy novels, while someone else got it from management school or from reading the newspaper or from being a foreign exchange student. In teaching a group, what one guy needs is wasting the others' time. Try to guess what EVERYBODY needs and put it on a CD-ROM, and you've got something that can probably benefit all of those people, but you never quite hit the bull's-eye. Plus, some people (like me) don't learn well from computer software, because the active computer display keeps the eyeballs too busy.
Another thing a CD can't do is deal with students' individual temperaments. One good example: A lot of, but not most, students from Germany have an almost pathological fear of making mistakes, and they fall into deep self-loathing when they commit a completely normal error, even a trivial one. You can see it on their faces. (I hate to make this specific to one ethnic group, but every student I ever get who acts like this is German.) These students will stall around and avoid doing grammar exercises, or engaging in any instructional activity that they think will expose their fallibility. If they do try an exercise, some of them take three times as long to do it, because they have to go through all kinds of face-saving rituals before and after each item. These people can become pretty good learners, but the teacher has to put a great deal of effort into teaching them to accept language learning as a continuous process of normal small failures that result in gradual improvement. If someone who does not have this ego problem has to be in the same class with a person who does, it's a big waste of time for him. However, if the German guy doesn't get the psychological massage he needs, then he'll never pick up the language. That is why a person like this needs an individual lesson with a flesh-and-blood instructor.
Two other cases:
I had to teach the new CFO of a German-owned company. HR told me he wanted to know "business English" (they say this about everybody), but he already knew business English and the survival English he needed, at least to his satisfaction at the time. What he really wanted me to do was to talk about stock options trading with him, so that he could get fluent in that specific specialized slang. He also wanted me to read r?sum?s with him and teach him to "read between the lines" of them, which is a huge lesson in cultural orientation and language subtleties. No CD-ROM would help this guy get what he needed.
Another time I was sent a woman from Poland and told she could hardly talk and needed basics. It turned out that before I taught her anything else, she needed to learn to talk about her own paintings, and about painting in general. There's no CD-ROM for this, and there's no point in putting out an ESL CD-ROM dealing with just one person's paintings.
Besides all this, different people get confused about different things, and a person putting together a mechanical online lesson or CD-ROM can't anticipate everyone's problems, so the lessons wind up being too generic. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Mon Apr 16, 2007 12:56 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Hi Jamie,
I actually was referring to audio CD's. If you record some of the one-on-one sessions you do do with your students, you can make them available to other students or even your existing students. They can listen to them whenever they want. Imagine if there were a database of recorded audio sessions that feature a great variety of individual people. Let's say, a painter from Italy is looking for a very specific English course that covers phrases and idioms she can use to describe her paintings. She could search the database by using specific keywords and up came the one-on-one session you had with your Polish student. Now the Italian painter would not only benefit from the language instructions but they could tap into the Polish painter's experiences too. I agree that most existing ESL materials are boring and artificial. That's yet another reason why somebody should record individual one-on-one training sessions and make them available.
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Torsten
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| Tue Apr 24, 2007 13:49 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Hi Torsten,
If these audio CD's you're planning on publishing contain students' speech, then won't that be disturbing to the ones who are trying to learn the language (mistakes, error correction, etc.)? Also, some people might not like to make their training sessions public.
EU |
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Englishuser
I'm here quite often ;-)
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
Posts: 806
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| Tue Apr 24, 2007 14:09 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Englishuser wrote: | | If these audio CD's you're planning on publishing contain students' speech, then won't that be disturbing to the ones who are trying to learn the language (mistakes, error correction, etc.)? Also, some people might not like to make their training sessions public. |
That's exactly what I thought. People wouldn't want their one-on-one sessions available for just anybody to listen to. Even putting them on CD and publishing them would require convincing the student to sign a release form giving legal permission to use the lesson that way, and most of them would never sign. On top of that, in corporate lessons it's out of the question, because company secrets slip out all the time. The instructor has to keep that information under his hat, and making it available to the public on an instructional CD would be catastrophic to his career. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 11:43 am Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Hi Jamie,
You wrote:
| Quote: | | What he really wanted me to do was to talk about stock options trading with him, so that he could get fluent in that specific specialized slang. |
How did you become fluent in that specific specialised slang?
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Englishuser
I'm here quite often ;-)
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 11:54 am Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Englishuser wrote: | | Quote: | | What he really wanted me to do was to talk about stock options trading with him, so that he could get fluent in that specific specialized slang. |
How did you become fluent in that specific specialised slang? |
My mother was a good stock investor. I've read a lot of books about the stock market and about stock options trading, and I've taken an options trading course. Another factor to consider is that when I was a student, I had a job at a factory where the owners kept a big stack of old Wall Street Journals in the bathroom and near the lunch table. During lunch, coffee breaks and while I did my "business", I read that newspaper, and I read it at breakfast every day, because my parents also subscribed to it. All of this, cumulatively, over years, resulted in an ability to talk about business subjects in general and about the stock market in particular. Plus, in the US we have a 24-hour-a-day business and stock market channel on TV, and I worked in the advertising business for a few years.
The most amazing thing is when you find someone who has a degree in business and speaks excellent English, but is flummoxed when he has to explain the movements of something on a chart. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 12:44 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | The most amazing thing is when you find someone who has a degree in business and speaks excellent English, but is flummoxed when he has to explain the movements of something on a chart. |
Hi, Jamie !
It's not that amazing. I can speak perfect Russian, and I would become flummoxed if some smart guy started discussing with me economic issues, (cuz I havent the slightest idea of those special words required to be able to talk over those issues)
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Alex
How much upchuck would a woodchuck upchuck if a woodchuck could upchuck ?
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 lost_soul
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 12:51 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| lost_soul wrote: | | It's not that amazing. I can speak perfect Russian, and I would become flummoxed if some smart guy started discussing with me economic issues, (cuz I havent the slightest idea of those special words required to be able to talk over those issues) |
Sure, but if someone showed you a chart with a line going up and down, forming peaks and valleys, climbing up and sliding down, you'd be able to describe it vividly in your own language no matter what its subject was. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 13:11 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | lost_soul wrote: | | It's not that amazing. I can speak perfect Russian, and I would become flummoxed if some smart guy started discussing with me economic issues, (cuz I havent the slightest idea of those special words required to be able to talk over those issues) |
Sure, but if someone showed you a chart with a line going up and down, forming peaks and valleys, climbing up and sliding down, you'd be able to describe it vividly in your own language no matter what its subject was. |
If he couldnt do that kind of thing then I seriously doubt if he could speak excellent English back then. (or our conceptions of excellence in English differ  )
_________________
Alex
How much upchuck would a woodchuck upchuck if a woodchuck could upchuck ?
(a guy from Russia) |
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lost_soul
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 15 Sep 2006
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Location: South Park, Colorado, USA
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| Wed Apr 25, 2007 23:45 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Basically, his (or I should say their) English sounded terrific until they tried to do that one task. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Thu Apr 26, 2007 22:15 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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| Englishuser wrote: | Hi Torsten,
If these audio CD's you're planning on publishing contain students' speech, then won't that be disturbing to the ones who are trying to learn the language (mistakes, error correction, etc.)? Also, some people might not like to make their training sessions public.
EU |
Hi Englishuser,
You might want to try to see the upside potential in any ideas rather than focusing on disadvantages and majoring in the minors.
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Torsten
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| Thu Apr 26, 2007 22:36 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Hi Torsten,
Thank you for your post. I am sure you appreciate that Jamie and I have made some very important points as to why your idea of recording individual training sessions and making them available to the public is quite problematic. Today's people are very concerned about their privacy. You can't publish anything involving real students just like that.
You, Torsten, have told us many a time why you dislike what one might call a traditional EFL classroom. How would a learner of English benefit from listening to students trying to build a sentence? Now, this problem would go unsolved if you recorded training sessions with expert trainers and authentic ESL students and made their individual training sessions available to ESL learners.
What exactly do you mean when you say I shouldn't be "majoring in the minors"?
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Englishuser
I'm here quite often ;-)
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| Thu Apr 26, 2007 22:42 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Well, I guess discussing this won't get us anywhere. Once we produce and promoted the CD we might share our experiences here. Talking about how something is "problematic" only creates negatives images and cuts off all creativity. Why don't you suggest something constructive, Englishuser?
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Torsten
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| Thu Apr 26, 2007 22:55 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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Hi Torsten,
Why do you think you should publish CD's with students talking to instructors? Couldn't you just as well publish CD's featuring real-life encounters, possibly or even ideally involving English speakers from different countries?
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Englishuser
I'm here quite often ;-)
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Posts: 806
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| Thu Apr 26, 2007 23:14 pm Online vs. Personal Instruction [moved] |
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This sounds much better, Englishuser. You are right, this was our first attempt to record some "real life encounters". As you can hear the recording contains two native speakers and we might as well record some examples of excellent ESL speakers to encourage other learners.
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Torsten
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| Stephen Hawking is really great! | What country do most spammers come from? Russia or Belarus? |
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