In the past six months, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed not only our life, but also many aspects of education. The abrupt school closures and forced emergent shift to remote teaching and learning made education even more stressful and frustrated than before for both teachers and students. In addition to the “normal” challenges, Second Language (L2) education all over the world has lost a great amount of opportunities for social interaction with sustained comprehensible input, which are key to L2 learning (Cummins, 2007), along with limited “real” in-person practicing time and experience left. Luckily, language educators still identified some opportunities globally which could have potential positive long-term impact on the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).
TESOL Journal just published a special issue focusing on examining “challenges that language teachers and learners have experienced in English as Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) contexts around the globe and pedagogies that they have employed to overcome these challenges” (Shin, 2020). The collection includes pedagogical articles and reports of teaching and learning English online to young and adult learners around the world (e.g., US, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia) in both rural and urban areas for technologically resourced and under-resourced programs.
Technology has become both the challenge and the opportunity. I still remember the “Wow” moments when I myself explored all the online teaching resources, among which many were not free before the pandemic.
“Old-school” experienced ESL/EFL teachers have been enjoying the whole “new universe” and form/join numerous online teaching communities (e.g., online forum, webinar, conference). Such global bonding could be seen as one silver lining for the new language teaching trend. Positive pedagogical evidence has been found in South Korean, Hong Kong, and Indonesia (Ferdiansyah et al., 2020; Moorhouse & Beaumont, 2020; Yi & Yang, 2020)
Although the use of technology has grown, English teachers, especially who were used to the traditional in-person model for years, may feel unprepared, anxious, and frustrated if they have no related training or experience. Video conferencing, such as Zoom, to deliver synchronous live lessons still differs from the previous face-to-face experience for language teachers, and technological hiccups seem the be in the way all the time. ESL/EFL teachers now need to equip much stronger skills, if not to the expert level, in computer and technology compared to the pre-pandemic period. In Ohio, some suburban districts quickly switched to Canvas while many urban schools have had no existing virtual platform thus caused many difficulties in replacing the classroom teaching (Sayer & Braun, 2020). Such lack of resources in some places and countries could hinder the effectiveness of the “new normal” English teaching.
ESL/EFL teachers’ struggles accordingly challenge language program administrators, because teachers would turn to their colleagues and supervisors for support and advice. Innovative and creative collocation and professional development/training for ESL/EFL teachers become necessary for most language training programs. However,
language teaching requires knowledge and practice. How to provide meaningful classroom-based field/practicum experience has become important for language teacher training. Cho and Clark-Gareca (2020) shared some innovated school-based field experiences the TESOL teacher education programs provided to ESOL preservice teachers in New York.
The programs used teaching video libraries (i.e., collection of classroom teaching videos) to approximate observer experience and encouraged trainees to interact with their trainer teachers to approximate the participant-observer experience. They chose microteaching demos (without actual students) for practical teaching and felt confident about the results. In this case, technology could serve as the tool, or the second silver lining, to foster global teacher training, especially for participants who previously could not come to the US.
Another huge impact of the pandemic on ESL programs in the US is the dramatic decrease of enrollment. It is not very hard to understand the reasons behind such decline. Students who cannot physically study in an English-speaking country will lose practical experience and chances of authentic interaction with native speakers. Synchronous teaching via Zoom, compared to live class, still have limitations. This could lead to the reduced opportunities for English language acquisition, but the smart
TESOLers have been able to work collaboratively via various technologies and platforms to teach students using English to solve their own actual, meaningful problems. This could provide abundant collaborative L2 teaching, curriculum developing, and research opportunities, which could be the third silver lining.
After all these lessons learned, I think the next beneficial step should be going beyond and forward.
How to make COVID-19 as a chance to leap the global education forward, instead of falling back, is to expand the viewpoints on our own classes, schools, districts, even nation to a broader sense. Just before I finished this newsletter, I learned that a new e-book was released this month by WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education). The 50-chapter book,
Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined, provides “a contemporary historical record of how schools, NGOs, governments, and international organizations responded to school closures during the crisis.” I haven’t had time to read the book yet, but I hope it could be a good resource for post-pandemic TESOL.
References
Cho, S., & Clark-Gareca, B. (2020). Approximating and innovating field experiences of ESOL preservice teachers: The effects of COVID-19 and school closures.
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e548.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.548
Cummins, J. (2007). Rethinking monolingual instructional strategies in multilingual classroom.
Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10(2), 221-240.
Ferdiansyah, S., Ridho, MA., Sembilan, FD., Sembilan, FD., & Zahro, SF. (2020). Online literature circles during the COVID-19 pandemic: Engaging undergraduate students in Indonesia.
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e544.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.544
Moorhouse, BL., & Beaumont, AM. (2020). Utilizing video conferencing software to teach young language learners in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 class suspensions.
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e545.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.545
Sayer, P., & Braun, D. (2020). The disparate impact of COVID-19 remote learning on English learners in the United States.
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e546.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.546
Shin, D-S. (2020). Introduction: TESOL and the COVID-19 pandemic.
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e547.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.547
Yi, Y., & Jang, J. (2020). Envisioning possibilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications from English language teaching in South Korea. .
TESOL Journal, 11(3), e543.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.543
