Have you ever thoughts on how Englsih learning changed after Covid?. Elena King, Associate Director of the TESOL Program at Greensboro College visited the Ticmas living room at the TESOL Congress in Colombia, and spoke about the challenges that language teaching poses today. Elena King holds a PhD in Education from the University of North Carolina (USA) and currently serves as Associate Director of the TESOL Program at Greensboro College, where she coordinates intensive courses and graduate programs.
King was one of the most anticipated figures at the TESOL Congress in Colombia and participated in two meetings: a conference on the use of autobiographies to support the development of literacy in multilingual students and a workshop with Michelle Plaisance in which they shared the need to rethink the teaching of English in the new era that opens with the withdrawal of the pandemic. Between sessions, King visited the living room that Ticmas set up at the congress and talked about the challenges that language teaching poses today.
—How does English teaching change in this post-covid era?
—We know that teaching English is very important around the world and at Greensboro College we have developed a way to support teachers working in the virtual classroom, which we know has become more complex, but there are also great tools we use to connect. Now people feel much more comfortable using Zoom, WhatsApp and other technologies. In the TESOL Congress we had people who gave their lectures in person, but there were others who did it remotely. I think it’s something that has become very comfortable, and that connects us in a really innovative way. And also very beautiful. And it’s the way we’re doing it around the world.
—Is it a new era of globalization in students?
—“Yes, absolutely. You can take our study program from Colombia or from any other country. We always had students online, but now our entire program can be done online. Just like many other programs around the world. We are facing a global world and English really connects us all.
—What skills should students develop in this post-covid era?
—Obviously, some are the technological skills, but they must also develop others that allow emotional and psychological connection, and other communication skills that allow us to understand what they are trying to learn, what we want them to learn, where we can see them as people and not as bugs on Zoom.
—The context in which you learn is very important. But how do you attend to the context in a videoconference class?
—Most of our students arrive with a solid language background and are dedicated to teaching English. So, when they’re learning how to teach, we discuss a lot about what technologies actually support teaching. One of the courses we offer is an online pedagogy class. We work on the development of content and how to create classes in learning contexts worldwide. We work thinking about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous models, we think about which apps can be beneficial for students and how these apps work in different countries and contexts, to respond to the individualization of learning.
—What advice would you give to English teachers?
—The first and absolutely essential is to know your students. You can’t teach anything if you don’t know your students. A teacher must know who his students are, what his objectives are, and, once he has clearly established what the objectives of his class should be, he must ensure through self-evaluations that what he is teaching aligns with the objectives that he himself and his students have developed.
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