Emergency Remote Teaching in Language Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Background

When a group of 27 pneumonia cases were reported by Wuhan Health Authority in December 2019, many things changed worldwide (Committee W.C.H., 2019). First these cases were defined as novel Coronavirus, then World Health Organization announced COVID-19 “ public health emergency of international concern” and then as “pandemic” (Liguori & Winkler, 2020). The pandemic soon affected all nations. Owing to the fact that it was a novel virus and that there was no specific treatment, confinement seemed to be the only option at the time. However, this closure could affect industries very negatively. For this reason, a solution had to be found. Especially in the case of higher education sector closures were unacceptable because there were millions of students pursuing their degrees. This crisis could endanger the higher education institutions which invested in international education (Wang et al., 2020). For this reason, to confront COVID-19, higher education institutions searched for ways to continue education. One of the reasons behind discontinuing traditional education system was that COVID-19 was an infectious disease and that human contact transmitted this disease. Hence, social distancing was imperative. Traditional classes were held with many students in indoor classrooms, which could make way to the transmission of the disease. The other reason was that large gatherings were forbidden through the measures taken by the governments. The adoption of digitalized education came to the fore as it was impossible to continue with traditional classes, which altered the mode of teaching and brought in substantial challenges regarding unpreparedness.

Before the pandemic, education provided by higher education institutions was predominantly face-to-face, albeit distance education and online education offered by open universities (Erlam et al., 2021). Online education emerged as the best option during the lockdown (Dong et al., 2020; Hodges et al., 2020; Martinez, 2020). Hence, digitalization in education was accelerated. In a very short time after the lockdown millions of tertiary education students underwent a transition from face-to face to emergency remote teaching experience (Karakose, 2021; Trzcioska-Król, 2020 & Vlachopoulos, 2020). This rapid transition from face-to-face to online education introduced opportunities as well as challenges. Rather than online teaching and learning, this paper focuses on emergency remote teaching and learning. Differing from online teaching and learning, emergency remote teaching is a temporary situation which emerges during such a crisis as the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency remote teaching differs from online learning: