Hangisi Daha Etkili: Online İngilizce Kursu mu Yüz Yüze mi?

Elif and Can are old friends. They both want to speak better English.

Elif goes to a language school in the city. Her class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are twelve students in her class. She usually takes the bus. The bus takes forty minutes. She likes her classmates and her teacher.

Can studies at home. He has live online lessons with one teacher. Each lesson is forty minutes long. He only needs his laptop and headphones.

One evening, they meet at a café. Can asks Elif a question. "How long do you speak in class?"

Elif thinks about it. "Maybe two or three minutes," she says. "The teacher talks a lot. The other students talk too."

Can is surprised. "I speak for most of my lesson," he says. "My teacher always listens. She corrects my mistakes."

Elif still enjoys her class. But now she understands something important. Online or face to face is not the big question. The big question is simple. How much do you speak? And does someone correct you?

Elif and Can both decided to improve their English this year, but they chose very different courses. Elif signed up for a face-to-face group class at a language school, while Can went for live one-to-one lessons online.

After a month, they met for coffee and compared notes. Elif said she loved the atmosphere of her class. She had made new friends, and seeing real people every week kept her motivated. However, she admitted that the course took up a lot of her time. Her bus journey alone took forty minutes each way.

Then Can asked her a simple question: "How long do you actually speak in each lesson?"

Elif had never thought about it. There were twelve students in her group, and the teacher explained a lot of grammar. When she worked it out, she realised she spoke for only two or three minutes per class.

Can's experience was different. His lessons were shorter than hers, just forty minutes, but he was talking for most of that time. His teacher asked follow-up questions and corrected his mistakes straight away. As a result, he felt more confident than he had in years. His schedule was also more flexible, because he could fit lessons around his job.

Still, Can admitted that online learning was not perfect. Without classmates, it was sometimes harder to stay motivated, and he had to be more disciplined about practising between lessons.

In the end, they agreed on one thing. Where you learn matters less than what happens in the lesson. The more you speak and the more feedback you get, the faster you make progress.

When Elif told Can about her group class, he did not try to convince her that online lessons were superior. Instead, he did something more useful: he looked at what the research actually says.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education published a meta-analysis which found that, on average, students who took all or part of a course online did better than those who studied the same material face to face. Blended courses, which combine the two, appeared to produce the strongest results of all. At first glance, this looks like a decisive win for the screen. However, the report itself cautioned against that reading. In many of the studies, the online and classroom groups differed in how much time they spent, what they studied and how they were taught, and the online advantage was largest where online learners had spent more time on task than their classroom peers. In other words, the evidence suggests that time, not technology, did the lion's share of the work.

A year later, researchers at Columbia University's Community College Research Center took a closer look at the studies dealing with fully online, semester-length college courses and found no trend in favour of online learning. They also pointed out that most participants were relatively well-prepared university students, so the findings do not necessarily apply to everyone. The Department itself admitted it had too few studies of school-age learners to draw firm conclusions.

So what should a language learner take from all this? Can offered a rough calculation, stressing that it was an assumption rather than a finding. Imagine a forty-minute lesson with twelve students in which the teacher speaks for half the time. That leaves each student roughly 1.7 minutes of speaking. In a one-to-one lesson of the same length, the learner's share is many times larger.

Elif found the numbers food for thought. The real question, she realised, is not whether a lesson happens in a classroom or on a laptop, but how much you speak and how much feedback you receive while you are doing it.