How Emergency Remote Online Language Teaching Informed Post-Lockdown Practices in China

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogies for Equitable Access: Reimagining Multilingual Education for an Uncertain World (Table 12)

Abstract

During the recent pandemic-induced emergency shift to online instruction, language teachers around the world experienced firsthand the many and productive forms of interaction afforded by teaching languages online. To understand how teachers made sense of the medium and the pedagogical opportunities it affords, we queried teachers about their experiences during and after the school lockdowns in China. The question that guided our research was - How did English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ experiences with the affordances and efficiencies of online instruction inform their during-lockdown and post-lockdown practices? The framework that informed the study design was that of interaction in language education. The resulting longitudinal case study followed two elementary EFL educators from the start of their three-month lockdown and back to their regular classrooms. Semi-structured interviews that incorporated course artifacts and archived class recordings comprised the dataset. This was iteratively analyzed to determine the ways these teachers considered and implemented online language instruction in the service of interactivity, the central aspect of language education. Through extensive analysis and member-checking, we determined how these teachers’ online teaching practices gave rise to newly adopted practices post-lockdown.

From our data analyses, it became evident that the opportunities and affordances of teaching online had shaped and reshaped these teachers’ practices. The ways that specific online language teaching experiences impacted their post-lockdown classroom teaching practices are illustrated and discussed in detail. Three major areas of technology-induced change are documented: 1) tailoring instruction; 2) managing instruction; and 3) extending instruction. Each is discussed and illustrated through the reported experiences of the two case study subjects. How these Emergency Remote Online Language Teaching (EROLT) experiences catalyzed and facilitated these teachers’ professional development informs research on language teacher professional development generally, and methods and impacts of instructional technologies integration.

Authors

• Carla Meskill, University at Albany - SUNY

• Dongni Guo, University at Albany - SUNY

• Fang Wang, University at Albany - SUNY

• Wuri P. Kusumastuti, University at Albany - SUNY