Empowering and Motivating Language Students in an Online Environment

Introduction

In the general field of education, there is a substantial corpus of research-based best practices and recommended strategies for teaching; world language (WL) education is no exception and continues to contribute to pedagogical inquiry through a specific disciplinary lens. Additionally, educators and researchers in second language acquisition (SLA), classical languages, and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) have made significant contributions to the body of research that benefit numerous adjacent (and not-so-adjacent) content areas. In sum, there is ample fodder to guide instructional practices for all levels of language learners in all contexts. While these research-backed recommendations are deemed highly valuable by the greater language teaching community, there can be a disconnect between scholarly publications and instructors putting recommendations into practice. Constraints such as lack of access to publications, barriers to joining professional organizations, and limited time due to other obligations can prevent many instructors from taking advantage of the insights provided by the research and then implementing those practices in their classrooms, opting for preferred tried-and-true techniques rather than experimenting with (potentially) time-consuming innovations.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, changed everything. Within the span of mere days, educational institutions around the world were forced to rethink what instruction would look like and how they would interact with their students. With learners and educators unable to safely gather in the physical space where instruction had traditionally occurred, there was a rapid shift to what Hodges et al. (2020) refer to as “emergency remote teaching” (ERT), or rather the instruction that sprang from necessity with little-to-no training or transition period. While many language programs offer well-designed and executed online, hybrid, and hyflex instructional models, ERT is a “temporary shift of instruction delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances” (Hodges et al., 2020). Throughout this chapter, reference to “online and remote learning” indicates the latter classification rather than online, blended, hybrid, or hyflex courses that were planned and implemented intentionally.

With the sudden onset of a new mode for delivering instruction, WL educators of all levels began a trial-and-error process to determine what techniques would work best to present content, pique interest, and support students on their paths to meeting goals in this unfamiliar setting. Educators were suddenly being asked to incorporate a wide variety of slightly familiar or wholly unfamiliar technology tools on a daily basis. According to a recent study of student teachers of WL, 49.5% described their knowledge of language learning technologies as novice and 38% described it as intermediate. Only 11% of participants rated themselves as advanced in their skills, with the remaining 1.5% self-identifying as expert (Hlas et al., 2017). Clearly, the overwhelming majority of the participants did not feel equipped with substantial skills for incorporating technology into language learning. As WL instructors advanced from spring 2020 into the 2020-2021 academic year, however, they began to conceive of and implement new strategies that were effective with their students.

The study outlined in this chapter has focused on the adaptability of WL instructors in the K-12 and postsecondary levels as they navigated the unpredictability of the pandemic era and has identified areas of success in incorporating technology to reach and educate their students. Parsons et al. (2018, p. 206) stated, “To effectively navigate these contexts and provide all students with a quality education, teachers must be flexible and creative in their approach as they adapt their instruction to support the various learners under their care;” participants in the study did just this. Through responding to a series of items on a questionnaire, 49 WL educators representing a variety of languages and levels shared activities that they developed and found to be the most effective during online remote learning.

The analysis of the data from this study has revealed that, even if instructors reported little or no exposure to current WL pedagogy research and publications, the practices and strategies they developed out of necessity often aligned with accepted best practices in the field. Concurrently, much research supported the pedagogical innovations that WL educators had been using, began implementing more, or even came to embrace.