Improving maritime english oral communication skills in an online environment: Engaging students as teams

Abstract

Online education has been an option until the first half of the year 2020. After the outbreak of COVID-19, online learning has gradually become a must for education. In this period, institutions have had to transform and adopt not only their teaching approach and content, but also their technology. Maritime education and training inevitably has followed the same pattern. As English is the operational language of the sea, teaching maritime English has had its share from this transformation. This study focuses on improving maritime students' job-related communication skills in an online environment with online role-playing. The study firstly reviews general requirements and setbacks involved in online teaching and language requirements at sea. The focus of the study is on online oral communication role-playing to perform ship-based external communication. The study concludes by pinpointing minimum requirements for conducting such training, lessons learned from the sessions, as well as knowledge and experience achieved by the students.