Five Reasons Why Teaching English Online and Teaching English in the Class are Extremely Different

Five Reasons Why Teaching English Online and Teaching English in the Class are Extremely Different

My name is Mike and I’m an English teacher in Taiwan. I have more than 10 years of English teaching experience online and in the classroom. There are a lot of different reasons why both of these ways to teach English are a little bit different from each other. I’ve gone through almost every situation that you can probably think of when it comes to English teaching. In this article, I’m going to just basically explain to you some of the reasons why English teaching online and in the classroom are a little bit different

Class control

I usually say to people that if they are interested only in teaching adults that they won’t have a job. You got to teach kids sometimes. The thing is that all over the world the parents of these kids want to have their kids reach their goals. Adults will cancel classes at the last minute. Adults will reschedule. Sometimes it’s a big mess. At the end of the day, some adults may even give up on your English lessons because they feel like they don’t need them

So you have to teach kids. Kids need structure, kids need to respect authority when it comes to the classroom. If you’re gonna be having a five-year-old learning English with you online, it might present a lot of challenges. For me, I don’t prefer to teach kids that old, but it also depends on maturity. 

Some kids can be left alone and they just learn while they’re online. Kids need to be thoroughly engaged in the lesson. What I mean by that is, either the teacher's presence or some very useful video tools in the lesson. I prefer to go a little bit more low-tech and just have my presence in the video.

You need to have the kids under control in a regular classroom. You’re probably gonna have at least five students in the classroom too. More often than not you probably will have one kid or one student in the classroom at any time when you’re doing online lessons. If you have the chance to teach more than one child, I would recommend that their parents are around so they can get the kids to focus on the lesson. I know that English teaching online is kind of a new type of realm, and a lot of people have a lot of different expectations. For me, I would say that the parents should help the child focus on the lesson. 

If people disagree with me that’s OK. I just want what’s best for the student. The point is that the students need to be under control for them to have benefited from online teaching

Amount of students

The amount of students varies when it comes to online teaching. In a classroom, I’ve heard in the States,regular teachers will have maybe 30 kids in one class. For me, that would be a huge challenge. I have also taught maybe 60 students in one class, which I could say is crazy. That was in mainland China. Depending on where you’re at, then you’re going to be having at least 10 students probably in a regular classroom, which would make it profitable for the school. Online, you could teach one on one, but at the same time, you’ll probably be making less money. 

Kinds of students

I can be teaching one student who’s from mainland China, and then I could switch over to another student who I met from Brazil. That’s just kind of the nature of online teaching. Because you could just switch from one location to another, then you could switch over to a different student with different abilities, a different learning environment, and just everything is different. Obviously when you’re teaching English in the classroom then you need to focus on the fact that basically, all these kids are from the same place. All the students are from the same place and everything is the same. 

In a situation where you’re teaching in maybe a Conversation School in Canada, then you’re gonna have a lot of students from a lot of different places. At the same time, they’re all students who want to travel to a different country to go learn English. So in that way they’re all the same.

How to teach

With online teaching, you need to focus a little bit of your time and energy into learning how to use technology to teach. You’ll have some whiteboards that you use with a mouse. Also, you might have a PowerPoint presentation. A lot of apps these days have animations that people use. I would say because online teaching is so focused on cell phones and computers, you have to visually stimulate the student.

Adults in an online teaching environment are a different story. You could probably make your lesson as bland as possible, as long as they get the information, and have a little bit of a good time, I think they’re OK.

With regards to a regular classroom, however, you need to get the students to interact with each other. You need to have the students have fun and play games. You can go up to a student and say hey can you do this differently, or can you speak with a louder voice. You can focus on minute new details on how students speak English. To be honest with you I think that it’s probably better for younger learners to go into a classroom environment to learn, but some people don’t have any choice.

In the coming years, we’re probably going to see more and more students that have probably learned online for the majority of their lives, depending on where their location is. And that might not necessarily be a bad thing

Equipment

If you get fed up with computers, and you don’t like to work with technology, then English teaching online probably is not for you. And for me, I’ve gone through multiple microphones and earphones. I’ve gone through maybe one or two computers. Cell phones, I’ve had probably 10 cell phones. If this sounds like a complete horror story for you, then this is probably something that you shouldn’t venture into

On the other hand, depending on where you’re teaching, you can go super low-tech. You can have a whiteboard with a couple of markers and just some students. You can just go around the classroom and just make sure everybody’s having a good time, learning something too, and you’re okay. So obviously we’re in 2022, but people need to kind of figure out which one of these environments that they’re comfortable with when it comes to teaching English.

If you’re a classical English teacher, you might just be more comfortable with teaching people in person. As technology moves along and people adapt more and more to it, then I’m not gonna say that English teaching in the classroom will be eliminated, but more and more people will go towards online teaching. 

Online teaching is super convenient. You can make a schedule whenever you want. You have hundreds if not thousands of different teachers to choose from on different apps. At the end of the day when it comes to online teaching, The onus is more on the learner to get what they want from the lesson. It’s up to you to pick the platform that you’re good with. Whether you’re a teacher or a student.

I prefer online teaching. I prefer the one-on-one interaction and the ability to move to different locations without leaving my room. Some other people may prefer another way. Having a more personal touch probably works more within in classroom approach. Whichever way that you prefer, then go ahead and do it. If you like convenience, go online. If you like to interact with your students more and are more motivated by the quality of the lesson, then teach in the class.