The College of Foreign Languages (CFL) of TYUT responded positively to the University’s call to postpone school open days but not stop studying and teaching during the COVID-19 outbreak. Following the College’s arrangements, Liu Jinfeng(Bridget) and Duan Yutong managed to help 16 foreign teachers to carry out online teaching through creating class groups on live-streaming platforms such as Chao Xing, Ding Talk, and QQ Class. Courses were delivered to a total of 169 classes, 147 classes from the College of Foundation Studies and 22 from CFL. Coordinated by Teaching Affairs Department and International Cooperation Division, the class schedules of overseas foreign teachers were adjusted accordingly to overcome such problems as time differences, so they could carry out the online courses smoothly, which reflects the University’s compassionate care.
The foreign teachers have shown a rigorous, down-to-earth and innovative online teaching style. David Mason set up his own teaching website which contains the teaching materials’ language points, listening exercises as well as background information. Students can not only do listening exercises anytime anywhere, but also complete all the after-class exercises to pass the regular assessment as required, which plays an effective role in supervising students’ learning process. Matthew McGettigan insisted to hold every lesson online, and adopted various ways such as roll-call, Q&A and real-time interaction to reduce students’ distraction and ensure a good class engagement. Overcoming language barriers to compare different live-streaming platforms, Emily Weaver finally chose Chao Xing which best suits her teaching style, and her courses were well received by the students.
During the online teaching, foreign teachers have offered many constructive suggestions, such as to establish a website to facilitate the real-time sharing of online resources of good teachers, and also to share these resources to the largest online learning platform in the world. This embodies the concerted effort of Chinese and foreign teachers for the University’s internationalization in the special period.
