Personalising EFL Courses for Online Learning

Abstract

Over the recent decades, we have witnessed a considerable shift in an EFL (English as a foreign language) lesson from a teacher-centered to a student-centered one. This change can be attributed to the concept of personalised learning and teaching, which led to the relevancy of the study. The paper aims to describe the main principles of the course development and analyse how a personalised approach is realised in the new General English course from Skyeng online school. The author describes some general principles applied to the course modelling: the type of the syllabus, main andragogical principles, and principles of effective language learning. The paper analyses what personalised learning is from the point of view of both: a teacher and a learner. In the results and discussion section, a description is provided of how the personalised approach works on the level of the whole course (the system of obligatory and optional lessons, 3 different studying tracks, the choice of the homework volume, the choice of the tests and exams for the student) and on the level of the lesson modelling (various lesson patterns, extra slides for additional practice). The author also analyses her research, which shows that teachers do not tend to be flexible when choosing the lesson materials and prefer the linear lesson track without changing the combination of lesson slides. This proved the need for such lesson models in Skyeng online school which would be designed to be quite flexible in their structure. The represented approach to modelling a language course can be viewed as quite innovative and up-to-date and has proved to be effective.

Keywords

• personalisation
• online learning
• online teaching
• instructional design
• online language course for adults
• efl e-course