English class as I know it just isn’t enough. 3 hours a week isn’t close to what is needed for students to make progress with their English skills. In fact, it’s not even three hours. Students often arrive late, often have to leave early for meetings, or often need to cancel their class due to some unforseen work related event. This month, my class attendance sheets have been slammed by these last few “events.” Cancelled. Cancelled. Cancelled.

Result? Nothing. Seems like my student has hit an all time low as far as progress goes, and when we do have class, it seems that little to no improvement has taken place.

Sure, fluency has improved since we first began. But we seem to have hit a slump.

What Shall I do?

I really like this post: The Learning Habit. Main idea: Part of the learning process rests with the student. And in ESL, I believe that to be VERY true. Especially since you’ll take forever to aquire fluency at 3 hrs (or less) per week.

I think I would do well to begin pushing more responsibility to practice English onto the my student’s shoulders.

But I wonder if this will help anyway? Would I just be wasting my breath and my already precious classroom time? Likely students are too time starved to do anything anyway. (That’s why I rarely assign homework: adult business professionals hardly have the time to do it. When they aren’t at work – or when work hasn’t followed them home, they’re trying to spend time with their family. When would you want to do homework?)

So I wonder if the solution to upping student engagement with English class (Attendance, more time on practice and fluency development) is somewhere in the “timeshift“

Would English class ever work as an “On demand” option? Where the student can access the teacher, ask questions, practice,  and get feedback whenever and wherever they want?

One thing that Teaching English is not: the transfer of knowledge. It’s far more than that, so having a knowledge bank of grammar and sound files for students to access at will would not solve the problem. Would help, yes – but not solve.  In my humble opininon, you still need basic human interaction in order to develop fluency. How do you get that “on demand?”