COVID-19 Pandemic's Impact on English as a Foreign Language Teaching in Spain

Introduction

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the gaps in society globally. As at now, no country, race, or social group across the world is immune from this health crisis, and the entire planet is overwhelmed by the rapid spread and the disastrous effects of the coronavirus. Having no boundaries, this pandemic has dramatically changed the lifestyles of billions of people all around the world, obliged to “stay at home”.

In this context, one of the sectors most deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic has been education. Since the COVID-19 pandemic was unpredictable, all the education systems of the world had to be transferred into distance education without pre-planning. This provisional online teaching was called Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT), which can be defined as a temporary, unexpected “shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances” (Hodges et al., 2020, par. 18). At all its different levels, teachers and students have been forced to change the way in which they communicate, interact, teach, and learn during the time they were locked at home (Rospigliosi, 2020). Nevertheless, it has not been equally easy for all levels and matters. Practitioners agree that working with younger learners from the distance was most certainly difficult, given the lack of maturity of students, of means for both teachers and pupils and the unavailability of parents as helpers at home, among other factors (Turchi et al., 2020).

Similarly, teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has also been negatively affected by the pandemic and the lockdown. The results obtained by Şendoğan (2020) emphasize that listening and writing skills were weak elements, especially because integrating all language skills in distance/remote language lessons needs to be planned carefully in advance, which was not possible in the context of Emergency Remote Language Teaching (ERLT).

To explore these changes in EFL language instruction, the authors carried out this exploratory qualitative study to analyze the Spanish Primary teachers’ perceptions regarding teaching EFL in the Emergency Remote Language Teaching (ERLT) context derived from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the comeback to face-to-face teaching. For this purpose, the authors carried out semi-structured interviews (n = 11) and used content analysis to code participants’ responses into different categories and subcategories exploring their views on various curricular and organization-related aspects, aimed at answering the following research questions (RQs):

RQ1: How EFL teaching and learning has been affected by the lockdown derived from the COVID-19 pandemic?

RQ2: What have been the challenges and opportunities that ERLT has brought to EFL teaching and learning?

RQ3: Have EFL teachers continued using the the resources and strategies learnt during the ERLT situation in the comeback to regular EFL lessons after the COVID-19 lockdown?