The experiences related to in this article stem from a
teacher-student co-operation of English language learning
over a period of more than 5 year. The students in
question started out as a group of 10 students in their late
teens and early twenties, all of them were a female. The
aim of the teaching process varied from one student to the
other, and also, with a single person, there were different
needs over the years, starting from constant follow-up of
school material to exam preparation. Initially, with three
students the classes took the form of classic one-to-one
classes: the students explained their language learning
needs, the learning material to be used in these classes was
discusses jointly and the learning process happened at the
specific pace of the students. The classes were held
primarily at the home of the author, or if agreed otherwise,
in a public facility to make it easier to meet transportwise.
Language teaching by traditional, face-to-face
method worked fine. However, with other two the
students the situation was different: over these five years
the need for some form of distance learning arose. Partly
of this was due to the fact that there was a 20km distance
to be covered between the place of residents of the teacher
and the students, which increased to 50km, when the
students were living in the city of the university that they
attended. Yet, with apt organizing this difficulty could be
overcome by timing the classes for the weekend or their
days off when they were not at university. The crucial
points, though, were the occasions over the years when it
was the teacher, who had to spend some time abroad on
scholarship. Unluckily, the three occasions when this
situation came about, the times of the scholarships
coincided with intensive preparation periods for some
specific exams in the learning process. Under regular
circumstances, the number of classes per week would be
four-five times a week at 120-minute classes. This is an
enormous amount of active teacher-student work to
simply suspend for the duration of the teacher’s
scholarship, a period of four weeks. Thus an alternative
form of teaching had to be found, one that involved a realtime
connection. The program of choice was Skype.