Abstract:

The article outlines comparatively distance/blended educational cases before and during Covid19 quarantine (September 2019 – May 2020 academic year). The author exposes her experience of synchronous and collaborative English language teaching to the groups of students in Engineering (ESP) and in Linguistics (ESL) at different universities in Moscow, Russia.

As a result of the challenging practice and experiment, the author shares her first findings and some immediate reflections on how efficient and appropriate universal or specific collaborative teaching methods can be with different students’ groups and categories. So, the article offers several hypotheses to further research and discussion.

The list of the findings, specified in the article in more detail, is as follows:
1. Distance learning has more priorities in teaching ESP for particular students' categories vs face-to-face and even blended. It reflects (or depends on) their specialization, age, gender, technical abilities and possibilities, socio-cultural status: and what else?
2. With a collaborative distance/blended learning approach, it is NOT necessary for English language educators with human or linguistic backgrounds to additionally study specific technical subjects to teach academic and technical texts translation efficiently.
3. There are some universal didactic principles that can be deduced from the practical experience: for example, collaborative wiki didactics look universal and appropriate skills model when applied, but it requires more field research.
4. In author’s opinion, there is an urgent need to train all categories of higher education students - and include in ESP/ESL syllabus - how to use Neuro Machine Translation (NMT) for ANY texts translation and editing. It seems as another universal technical tool to teach English. This is the reality of our hybrid times and so education. Any other factors?
5. It is time to define the place and the role of collaborative and flexible blended aka hybrid pedagogical model in modern languages education for all students' specialties and categories.
6. Before that, it is necessary to research, analyze and classify universal vs specific collaborative language teaching approaches with different students’ categories and specializations at higher education level: in search of the most efficient, properly tailored combination of methods and skills to apply or avoid in any distance, blended and face-to-face didactic modes.

The article may be useful to any ESP/ESL/TESOL teachers interested in considering and discussing the above ideas, and possibly cooperating with the author in further research.

Keywords:

Higher education, distance learning, remote learning, blended learning, collaborative learning, English Language, ESP, ESL, wiki collaborative didactics.