Adventures in Whatsapp

Anna Young, Kristina Smith and Abdoulaye Konate explored 'Adventures in Whatsapp' at the 7th online Future of English Language Teaching Conference.

See the video recording below:

Abstract

We would like to share our experience of creating a language development course for English language teachers in high schools in Guinea and how we used the materials on an eight-week course delivered mainly on WhatsApp. This was a collaborative project between the Guinea English Teachers’ Club and two teacher trainers from Bell, as part of the PRELIM 2 project.

The main aim of the course was to encourage the use of more English by teachers (and students) during English lessons. The course had three strands:

1. Monday – a weekly cultural topic where we exchanged photos and descriptions. Topics included houses, shopping, school, special days, cultural norms and rules.

2/ Tuesday-Thursday – language for the classroom. Topics included giving instructions, eliciting, asking questions and using pictures, games and stories.

3/ Pronunciation Friday – the main features of spoken English (weak forms, word stress, sentence stress, linking, intonation and sounds) & an emoji task to share more about our lives and interests.

We would like to share our experiences and give examples of the participants’ experiences of this course. In particular:

• how we designed the course, considering teachers’ limited Internet access and varying levels of English language proficiency.

• the rationale for our technology choices (lots of WhatsApp & a little Zoom)

• our experience of using WhatsApp as trainers to deliver course content

• the participants’ experience of using WhatsApp, what they practised and how they felt about this new way of experiencing teacher training

• the important contributions of the Guinea English teachers’ Club throughout the process.

We will share some of the successes of the course and lessons learned for using WhatsApp in other low-resource contexts.