The discussion would begin with asking students how long they’ve been working from home and whether or not they’ve been enjoying it. If necessary, I would share a story about how working from home has been a goal of mine for over a decade, and that I have been loving it because of the freedom, relaxed schedule and the ability to structure my day suited to my own preferences. I would then share that sometimes it can be challenging due to working so close to my bed and loving to take naps. A Google slide will then presented with a series of images. One person would be sitting at a computer working from home and around this central image a series of images such as a refrigerator, bed, children, husband/wife/partner, pets, television, iPad. A question will appear on the next slide that reads: “What has been the biggest challenge for you since working from home?” This task, (although reading focused) will help to activate both top-down and bottom-up processing, as students will be naturally recalling lexis related to their own personal cases. This task will take approximately three to five minutes.

This task will practice the skill of scanning for general information. Students will be asked to read the article once for gist, printed on a Google Form. There will be one question asking the students to imagine a suitable title for this article. The initial reading will be assigned a time of 10-12 minutes, then then students will meet back in the main Zoom forum to discuss their ideas with the instructor. In this phase, students will be practicing gist or general reading, as they will have limited time to read the article only once to extract the overall ideas given in the material to help brainstorm an appropriate title.

Students will be asked to read the article a second time for detail, printed on another Google Form. There will be four questions attached related to more specific details in the text such as “What is said about equipment and technology?”, “According to this article, what should you do if you don't have a work laptop?”, “How can you increase your bandwidth?”, “How can you help reduce distractions?” to help students to extract specific details reading more carefully for select information. The fifth question will ask if there were any tips that students personally disagreed with, helping to lead into the next and final productive skills speaking task. This task will also practice subskills to infer opinions relayed in a text which will then be commented upon in the final stage. Students will do this task individually for 6-8 minutes then will meet back to discuss answers as a group. The total time for this task will be 14-16 minutes.

As this is a topic familiar to many given the current situation, the Productive Skills Task will be a speaking task asking students to work together in pairs. Students will be shown a question on a Google slide asking them to come up with their own original list of top three tips to work from home successfully. After 6 minutes, students will meet back in the main room to share their ideas with the group for the remaining four minutes.