Luiz Amaral, Associate Professor and Director of Portuguese and Brazilian studies, teaches dynamic language classes with lots of opportunities to try out language skills. To adapt to remote teaching, Luiz decided to split his students into different groups using different modalities to keep them engaged and offer more targeted practice and feedback opportunities – two things that can be useful in any discipline.

 

What is it you are doing?

For every class I design synchronous activities to be done with the instructor and asynchronous ones in VoiceThread. I start the class with all students together, and I use 10 to 15 minutes to present the necessary materials, examples and models that we will use that day. If the content is more complicated, I pre-record a video that needs to be watched before class. After the initial 15 minutes, I divide the class into two groups. Group A stays with me on Zoom and group B goes to our Moodle site where they find the asynchronous activities. After 25 minutes, we switch roles and group B works with me while group A does the VoiceThread activities. In the last 10 minutes, all students return to the same room for final comments, questions and group feedback. For all activities (synchronous and asynchronous), students receive explicit instructions and models that help them do the expected work.

 

What motivated you to combine synchronous and asynchronous activities to be used during class time?

Second language learning is all about language use. The more opportunities students have to use the target language, the more they develop the necessary skills they need to become proficient in it. As one can imagine, remote learning complicates certain types of interactions and takes away important opportunities for language use, even when you use breakout rooms extensively. Another problem is that monitoring language practice is more complicated over Zoom. It takes time to go from one breakout room to the next, and you never get that (wonderful) experience of being in a room full of students talking to one another, which often happens in language classes. So, I decided to try different strategies to maximize student talking time and facilitate my ability to monitor their production and provide feedback.    

 

What has been the impact of this strategy on your students?

I have heard wonderful things about it from my students. First, there is a big difference when we compare synchronous and asynchronous activities for language use. The first one requires immediate responses and exchange of information, while the second one allows students to do a more careful language planning before they present their answers. The combination of on the spot use of language and a more carefully structured production helps them develop different sets of skills and linguistic knowledge. Another important advantage of combining both types of activities is that the nature of the feedback they get also varies. VoiceThread activities allow the instructor to call students' attention to language errors or inconsistencies in their language production, while synchronous activities are better for focusing on communicative shortcomings and specific strategies to convey the intended message.

 

What considerations or tips do you have for faculty?

Although this strategy was originally designed for language classes, I believe there are other occasions where instructors could use it to spend more time with specific groups of students or provide different types of feedback. The combination of asynchronous and synchronous activities during class time can maximize student participation and make class dynamics more interesting.

 

To learn more about VoiceThread, see the UMass IT page on the software.

 

To get help with your instructional technology needs, email instruct@umass.edu.