Foreign Language Teacher Perceptions of the Virtual Classroom

Introduction

During the COVID-19 lockdown period from March to May in 2020, the use of digital platforms was the only possible way to continue learning and teaching in schools. All over the world, teachers faced the need to adapt to the imperative of digital learning in a very short period of time. The educational community at all levels were affected: learners and their parents, teachers, school personnel, school management, policy makers and society in a broader sense. The majority of teachers introduced new learning content, assigned tasks and provided feedback to their students during the school closure; however, challenges were related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) integration and specific skills, such as online teaching and online assessment, which were mastered to a lesser extent (König et al., 2020). In addition, miscommunication regarding assignment deadlines emerged (Gelles et al., 2020); a mismatch between online learning and the curriculum occurred (Mailizar et al., 2020); and reconceptualization of student assessment methods was needed (Gamage et al., 2020; Lau et al., 2020). Especially teaching and assessing online productive skills has been considered difficult and somewhat confusing for both teachers and students (Bachiri & Oifaa, 2020). Thus, challenges emerged at curriculum, school, teacher, and/or student levels (Bingimlas, 2009; Mailizar et al., 2020).

To cope with this massive change, on 27th March 2020, guidelines for education response to the pandemic in Europe were established based on a questionnaire by OECD (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). According to the OECD report, Estonia coped quite well with the challenge to proceed with remote digital learning having previously already experienced the use of digital textbooks and having developed the necessary infrastructure (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). Nevertheless, teachers’ voices about their very stressful experience with mandatory virtual teaching echoed often in the media. Thus, our study strived to investigate how foreign language (FL) teachers of Estonia perceived the virtual classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in spring 2020 by examining their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK), by exploring which contextual and personal factors influenced their self-efficacy beliefs regarding virtual teaching, and how they perceived students’ engagement and encountered obstacles. We aimed to understand which factors, both contextual and personal, played a role in their perceptions of the virtual classroom.