CRAYON: Exploration on Community-based Relayed Online Education Approach for Rural Children in South Korean EFL Context

DOI

Rural children in South Korea exhibit higher foreign language anxiety and lower English competency. This long-standing education gap persists, although educational technologies have greatly facilitated access to learning materials. In this paper, we propose and explore a new pedagogical approach, CRAYON in which a pool of non-professional tutors take turns meeting and teaching rural children remotely in micro-sessions, which we refer to as short-relay sessions. As such, CRAYON provides a critical component of learning, as suggested by Sociocultural theory, that is lacking in the rural areas in South Korea: social interaction with a more knowledgeable other (MKO). To understand how a child and a newly-met tutor interact within the proposed setting, we conducted a short relay session-based English learning program for 5 rural children for 4 weeks in South Korea with 15 tutors. Our analysis of session recordings, interviews, and usage logs revealed a rich body of findings indicating the feasibility of short-relay session-based learning.