Online Language Teaching in Diverse Contexts

IJARW, 2023

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 led to a worldwide shift towards remote online language teaching and learning. Despite limited resources and preparation, language teachers and learners showed resilience, perseverance, and creativity in adapting to the challenging conditions. This set of studies delves into the obstacles faced by language teachers and learners in online instruction, investigates how they dealt with these challenges, and extracts valuable insights to aid language educators in responding to emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This opening article presents an overview of this special collection on teaching and learning languages online, examines the growing body of research on online language education, and introduces the studies featured in the collection.

Journal of Educational Technology and Online Learning, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to the way teachers teach and students learn. Although there is a surplus of research on online education, the transition period to online education is also worth investigating. This study set out to explore language learners’ perceptions of how they were impacted by emergency remote teaching (ERT). All the participants were students attending an English medium university in Turkey. The mode of teaching, changes in teacher-student and student-student interaction, online tools and materials used in the courses were investigated by a comprehensive self-developed online survey and the data were triangulated later by semi-structured interviews conducted with the volunteering participants. Most found the transition to ERT demanding, particularly the loss of face-to-face interaction; however, some students benefited from being able to better regulate their own learning process thanks to the recorded lectures and online materials. Students also appreciated receiving regular feedback from instructors about their progress.

Russian Language Journal, 2021

The world universities’ response to COVID-19: remote online language teaching, 2021

March 2020 saw the advent of a pandemic that is having a profound impact on all facets of our lives with special reference, in our case, to language education. Universities worldwide found themselves in an emergency predicament and we had to suddenly abandon traditional forms of classroom and/or blended learning and move to a completely remote online delivery of courses. The imperative to continue teaching in these new circumstances did not come, as very often is the case, from the relevant institutional administrations in a top-down manner, but from our own, inner pedagogical and human instincts. The usual lines of communication with our students and colleagues were cut off and we had to find and resort to new ways of communicating and teaching. We had no precedents to refer to and found ourselves in the situation to search for innovative solutions using the already existing technology, skills, resources, and methodological approaches. This situation was challenging in the extreme....

International Journal of Management, Technology, and Social Sciences (IJMTS), 2021

Online Teaching has been an effective method to meet a great number of learners at the global level. Learning this way leads the eager learners to find different ways to discover new horizons of knowledge. The online content of language learning has led many information seekers to concentrate on the acquisition of exuberant language skills. This paper study various methods and techniques that could be used to connect diverse information aspirants. Challenges are also being discussed in the existing eligible system for online language teaching. The virtual classroom here is designed with cyberspace to create a language learning atmosphere. The paper outlines the reasoning, design, including the use of these lesson plans that facilitate action and reflection across the learning cycle. The techniques and approaches set out in this paper will provide insight into the outcome of the initiative. This research also provides a look at the shots of online teaching. This study examines potential approaches and techniques and explores the wider possibilities and varied prospects for achieving the objective of helping the target group of students to achieve their goals. Possibilities have brought more benefits not only to the pupils, but also to the aspirants, irrespective of their age group. It also suggests some potential online training methodologies for teachers to take classes online.

The world universities’ response to COVID-19: remote online language teaching, 2021

This chapter reports on the ‘Corona teaching’ in a department of English studies at a German university of technology. It discusses the general frame in the German university system and in this specific department, faculty and university. It focuses on the responses depending on participants and learning objectives. One larger lecture for 1st year Bachelor of Arts (BA) students used Moodle to teach a traditional knowledge transfer course, the ‘History of English language and culture’. One smaller seminar used Big Blue Button (BBB) to teach a more interactive Master of Arts (MA) course on ‘Translation theory and technology’. The overall experience was positive for the good students who managed the challenge well, but it was negative for others who were less privileged in their technical equipment or their resilience. Some losses included more social class activities; opportunities included additional learning in the media and digital contexts – possibly invaluable advantages for furt...

2020

Online, Distance, Remote, Virtual or Blended Learning (with their similarities and differences, as these terms are by no means interchangeable) have been fixtures in scholarly and pedagogical discourses in recent years. However, in the spring of 2020, in the advent of the pandemic, most European teachers and students faced the necessity of using new technologies for learning, as well as for language learning. They had to shift to the online and distance methods almost overnight. Abrupt and rapid changes in the teaching-learning procedures, coupled with everyday routines, did not leave much time to process the needs of both students and faculty. Nevertheless, they revealed existing inconsistencies, problems and hinted at further necessary transformations – at times opposite to what was discussed and believed before the pandemic. This paper is a practice-based self-study aimed at outlining contentious issues in the implementation of online learning. While we focus on the Russian Langu...

2021

This study describes the changes in the instructional system experienced by the language departments in the University of Isfahan, Iran, during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak and the consequent national lockdown. After providing a very brief scenario of a regular academic year in higher education in Iran, this chapter focuses on the changes made to the instructional system in response to this worldwide pandemic and the non-academic measures taken across the university in general and language departments in particular. After pointing to some challenges of online instruction, the advantages and disadvantages of remote instruction with regard to the four language skills from both teachers’ and students’ perspectives will be discussed. A review of the assessment procedures in the platform used by the University of Isfahan will then be provided. This case study will come to an end by providing some outlook for the future.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 2021

The pandemic has impacted education in an unprecedented way forcing many schools to close their classrooms and transfer to the online teaching model. Language teachers, be that with adequate or inadequate training in using technology and digital materials for teaching, have been required to adapt themselves to the new teaching context so as to ensure language lessons are delivered successfully. During this period, most of the language teachers have used technology more than ever before and this may play a role in shaping the future of language teaching. This study aimed to investigate how much teachers have gained during the pandemic in terms of building self-confidence in technology use and how much they have used online resources to ensure self-development and quality classes for students. In addition, this research explores some possible far-reaching effects of teachers’ practices during the online teaching experience on the future language teaching profession. Twenty teachers from various high schools in North Macedonia participated in the study. The results indicate that online teaching has had an impact on how teachers view technology for language teaching as well as on how this may influence their future teaching practices. Keywords: technology, online teaching, online resources, professional development