“So, I decided to focus on all the useful words with her first.”

Student teachers in Zurich teaching online English lessons one-to-one to young learners in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan with a focus on lexis.

Résumé

Instead of doing an on-site-teaching internship at a primary school in an English-speaking country (Assistant Teachership), about 300 student teachers from the Zurich University of Teacher Education taught ten one-to-one online English lessons to young learners from Kyrgyzstan. This was administered by the language-learning-platform, loquilove. Due to the learners’ basic English knowledge, student teachers mostly focussed on teaching lexis. The evaluation of the alternative programme revealed that both student teachers and headmasters of the Kyrgyz schools agree that thanks to these online lessons the young learners expanded their lexical knowledge and in addition that most student teachers made considerable progress in their media competence.