HOW (THOROUGHLY) DOES THE MEDIUM SHAPE TEACHING? SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON DOCTORAL COURSES AT THE VANVITELLI UNIVERSITY

HOW (THOROUGHLY) DOES THE MEDIUM SHAPE TEACHING? SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON DOCTORAL COURSES AT THE VANVITELLI UNIVERSITY It is by now an accepted notion that in our age, pandemics, like wars, lead to an acceleration of scientific and technological advances. In recent times, the field of education has been one of the main points of interest for technology, and the existing digital divide in school populations has been brought to the fore, due to both the lack of resources in many (educational) contexts and the digital skills gap among users. Furthermore, in ELT, the employability of apps, platforms and social media has been amplified and improved, to make synchronous online teaching possible and more effective (ZOOM and Google Meet, Microsoft teams, etc). Incidentally, ELT teachers at all levels of education had to develop skills for distance teaching all of a sudden, and to some extent/duration some of them were no longer the ‘all-knowing voice’ in their virtual classrooms, which entailed some (transient) identity issues – not necessarily negative. Indeed, a greater danger could be seen in the increasing focus on the functioning of the tools, rather than in the ‘content’ of the teaching activities. Yet, on the whole, given the traditional abundance of (free) online resources for teaching English and the habitus of teachers of using them, when the available online language learning platforms and tools were well-functioning and updated/adapted, many educational experiences were considered positive (Moorhouse and Kohnke 2021). Furthermore, attention should be paid to the difference between the communicative value of a lesson prepared to be recorded and a synchronous online distance lesson which the students ask to be recorded. When teaching in real-time classes (with students participating via computer or I-phone), there is a lot of ‘wasted’ time in overcoming connection/tools problems, in establishing contact, in eliciting students’ interventions and discourse etc., which spoil the effectiveness of that lesson when accessed later. This study will briefly refer to the burgeoning literature on teaching during the Covid 19 pandemic (Moorhouse, Kohnke 2021, 2020; Fitria 2020; Yunus, Ang, Hashim 2021; Mahib ur Rahman 2020), and provide some insights into the 2021-2022 English for Research and Publication Purposes (ERPP) courses of the Doctoral School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Vanvitelli University. The lessons were initially held online and, as soon as it was possible, in a blended dimension, for a total of 90 students (the lecturers and part of the student were in a well-equipped multimedia language laboratory, most of the students were connected via Microsoft Teams). The undeniable value of eye contact, proxemics, body language – i.e., of sharing the same physical space – was thus partly recovered. In a way, in the flattened spatial dimension of Microsoft Teams, students from India, Pakistan and other extra-European countries were not perceived as ‘distant’, as the affordances offered by the media were empowering for these students. Some reflections on the communicative situation in which videos retrieved from a variety of sources (ELT platforms, news media, YouTube) were transmitted both in the physical space of the language laboratory and though the medium/channel of Microsoft Teams, in our multi-layered metaverse, will also be proposed. In some detail, the teaching approach was informed by the ESP/ERPP methodologies, with a focus on the learning objectives and needs of the doctoral students. The selection of topics and materials was a major issue, given the variety of fields involved (architecture and design, comparative law, international law, heritage, psychology), their rather different epistemological positions and the common need to develop an efficient mode of scientific dissemination The students’ production of written materials (mainly abstracts, research reports, ppt presentations), which were discussed during the lectures, played a central role in the implementation of the course objectives, and some Microsoft teams functions were useful in sharing of these and other materials. A sample of the students’ production was excerpted for analysis in this paper. The mode of evaluation was also taken into consideration, as at the end of the course, after an examination, a report was issued on the skills acquired by each student in ERPP, which is also discussed in this study. Indeed, against the fluid background of this blended courses, the use of writing assignments and the issuing of detailed written assessments were helpful.