scholarly journals EFL Teachers' Experiences During the Pandemic: Stories From Rural Area in Tungkal Ilir District

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-308
Author(s):  
Pahrozi Ahmad ◽  
Anita Triastuti

ABSTRACTThis article explores the implementation of online learning by English teachers in the age of the coronavirus pandemic in the Tungkal Ilir district, West Tanjung Jabung Regency. This article examines two research questions: (1) How do EFL teachers describe their practices and perceptions of online learning during the pandemic, and (2) What challenges EFL teachers face while implementing online learning during the pandemic. In this small-scale qualitative study, three English teachers took part. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather information. The result revealed that teachers in remote areas used social media and digital platforms to carry out their online teaching. On the other hand, these teachers had some issues incorporating online learning. The problems can be divided into two categories: (a) unfamiliarity with the platforms and (b) inability to respond to students quickly. In addition, some suggestions are also given for further researchers to conduct a similar study. ABSTRAKArtikel ini membahas tentang implementasi pembelajaran online oleh guru bahasa Inggris di era pandemi virus corona di kecamatan Tungkal Ilir, Kabupaten Tanjung Jabung Barat. Artikel ini membahas dua pertanyaan penelitian: (1) Bagaimana guru EFL menggambarkan praktik dan persepsi mereka tentang pembelajaran online selama pandemi, dan (2) Apa tantangan yang dihadapi guru EFL saat menerapkan pembelajaran online selama pandemi. Tiga guru Bahasa Inggris diambil sebagai responden dalam studi kualitatif skala kecil ini.  Wawancara semi terstruktur digunakan untuk mengumpulkan informasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa guru di daerah terpencil telah menggunakan media sosial dan platform digital untuk melaksanakan pengajaran online mereka. Disisi lain, guru memiliki beberapa masalah dalam penerapan pembelajaran online. Masalah dapat dibagi menjadi dua kategori: (a) ketidaktahuan dengan platform dan (b) ketidakmampuan untuk merespon siswa dengan cepat. Selain itu, beberapa saran juga diberikan bagi peneliti selanjutnya untuk melakukan penelitian serupa.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 728
Author(s):  
Niely Fawaidah Virgin ◽  
Imam Qalyubi ◽  
Zaitun Qamariah

This study aimed at investigating the challenges and  identifying the way the English teachers solve the challenges toward online teaching during Covid-19 pandemic. This study was qualitative research. Three instruments were used to collect the data, those are: open-ended questionnaire, interview and documentation. As a result, this study showed that there were eight challenges experienced by the English teachers in remote areas toward online teaching during Covid-19 pandemic, those are: (1) inadequate infrastructure; (2) student’s learning attention; (3) financial condition; (4) students readiness; (5) parent’s concern; (6) designing materials; (7) measuring student’s understanding, and (8) the instability of student’s motivation. During teaching-learning process, there were various ways in overcoming the challenges done by the English teachers, those are: (1) create an interactive media; (2) decide the most suitable online learning tool; (3) give additional time for the students; (4) provide adequate facilities for both teacher and student in remote areas. Keywords:  Challenge, Covid-19 Pandemic, English Teaching, Online Learning


Author(s):  
Arif Nugroho ◽  
Dwi Ilmiani ◽  
Agnira Rekha

<p class="AbstractText">The unexpected shift of English language teaching from face-to-face classroom interaction to online learning activities using digital platforms has resulted in a number of challenges for English teachers and students. Hence, examining the teachers’ challenges and their insights of the online learning activities is highly required. The present study sheds some light on university EFL teachers’ challenges and insights of online learning activities amidst global pandemic. Drawing on the data collected using self-written reflections and semi-structured interviews from 17 Indonesian EFL teachers, the results revealed that the absence of an e-learning platform, lack of students’ motivation and engagement, and time consuming to prepare online learning materials became the primary challenges of the teachers. The results further portrayed that developing a representative digital platform, designing online learning materials, and improving the quality of teaching method were several valuable insights from the teachers. The results of this study contribute to providing fruitful advices for English teachers, students, and school authorities to enhance the efficacy of online teaching and learning activities, particularly during the global pandemic.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Maha Al-Freih

The aim of this phenomenological study is to provide a deeper understanding of the impact of remote teaching on instructors’ perceptions of online learning and future teaching practices amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze open-ended semi-structured interviews conducted with five higher education faculty in Saudi Arabia. Three major themes were identified: enhancing student engagement; increased awareness of technology affordances and constraints; and moving from emergency remote teaching to technology-enhanced and blended learning. Participants of this study were mainly concerned about finding ways to support active student engagement in this new learning environment, which in turn increased their awareness of the educational affordances and constraints of online learning and technologies. Participants’ deeper understanding of the potential of online technologies in supporting student learning, as well as their own and students’ increased familiarity and comfort with online learning and technologies, served as the main drivers for potential future implementation of blended learning and technology-enhanced teaching practices. With that said, participants were still apprehensive about engaging in fully online teaching, arguing that blended strategies and enhanced-technology integration are more likely to overcome some of the limitations of face-to-face teaching and improve the overall learning experience for their students. Discussion of these findings in relation to the extant literature and their implications for higher education institutions moving forward are provided.


Author(s):  
Suha Abdulrazzaq Slim

This study attempts to investigate the willingness of Jordanian EFL teachers to endure taking Online Professional Development Programs (OPD) rather than face to face learning in both private and public schools. Therefore, a qualitative research methodology was carried out to examine the extent to which Jordanian EFL teachers are willing to endure taking Online Professional Development Programs (OPD) rather than face to face learning. Data were collected via online interviews with teachers through e-Learning forums as well as other means of interactive social Medias such as Zoom, Facetime and Microsoft teams during COVID-19 Pandemic in the second semester of the scholastic year 2019-2020. Ten EFL teachers were randomly chosen from forty public and private EFL school teachers to respond to the interviews. The sample consisted of ten teachers who were selected randomly for the interview. The interview content focused on two domains which are: the challenges faced teachers in online learning and the good learning practices experienced by EFL teachers during online learning regarding their experiences through the pandemic. The interviews were taking the form of semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study revealed that the majority of EFL teachers are unwilling to continue taking online professional development programs as they faced many troubles and obstacles through experiencing distant learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic as part of their first hands on experience. Two teachers showed a tendency to continue Online Professional Development Programs in parallel with face to face programs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Mustafa Civelek ◽  
Işılay Toplu ◽  
Levent Uzun

The purpose of the present study is to shed light on the attitudes of Turkish EFL teachers towards online instruction (OI), the impact of training on their attitudes, the obstacles they encounter, and the strategies to deliver OI more successfully throughout the Covid-19 outbreak. The participants were 70 EFL teachers (52 female, 18 male). The data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed by using SPSS 26. Descriptive statistics of each item was calculated and an independent sample t-test was conducted to answer the research questions. For the analysis of the interview data, the responses of the participants were transcribed and the recurring themes were identified. The results revealed that the attitudes of Turkish EFL teachers, who experienced online instruction during the Covid-19 outbreak, are not as positive as expected regarding some of the results of the related research in the literature. The interview findings revealed that EFL teachers do not feel capable of delivering online instruction effectively since they do not have adequate knowledge and necessary skills to do that. In view of the findings, it’s suggested that online instruction methodology should be integrated into teacher training programs and teachers should receive an in-service training about the related subject.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 231
Author(s):  
Justina Naujokaitienė ◽  
Giedrė Tamoliūnė ◽  
Airina Volungevičienė ◽  
Josep M. Duart

Student engagement is one of the most relevant topics within the academic and research community nowadays. Higher education curriculum, teaching and learning integrate new technology- supported learning solutions. New methods and tools enhance teacher and learner interactions and influence learner engagement positively. This research addresses the need to explore new ways of improving teaching practices to better engage students with the help of learning analytics. The paper investigates how university teachers use the data from learning analytics to observe learners and to engage them in online learning. Qualitative inquiry was chosen to approach the research problem, and semi-structured interviews with the teachers using (blended) online learning were conveyed to explore teacher practices in students’ behaviour and engagement observations online, disclosing teachers’ abilities to understand the challenging learner engagement process based on the data from learning analytics. The new evidence provided by this research highlights the successful practices in the use of learning analytics data to observe students’ behaviour and engagement and to inform teachers on the presence needed in order to develop learner–centred activities and to make curriculum changes. The limitation of this study lies in the fact that the different online teaching experiences that research participants had might have restricted their understanding of the use of LA data for curriculum development and learners’ engagement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (29) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharihan Shawkat Azeez

Metaphor acts as a window into comprehending teachers’ experiences through providing insights into complex concepts of teaching and learning. As a result, it plays a crucial role in exploring beliefs about teachers’ roles in the teaching and learning process. To elicit ideas and beliefs which both teachers and students held about the role of English teachers, questionnaires were given to 30 teachers and 85 students in the University of Duhok, English Department. The questionnaire asked the subjects to provide their beliefs about English teachers’ roles by using a sentence completion task “An English teacher is…. because….”. Eight conceptual categories are introduced from the linguistic metaphors and example metaphors for each category are given in the results tables. The eight conceptual categories include: teacher as devotee, teacher as nurturer, teachers as provider / source of knowledge, teacher as cultural transmitter, teacher as authority, teacher as guider, teacher as a friend, and teacher as a nice beautiful soul. All participants expressed the same conceptual categories, but still they use different metaphors to express their views. An interesting feature of these results is that there are some parallel and overlaps of metaphors among different subjects. The findings of this study suggested subtle differences between students’ and teachers’ beliefs. This study will benefit teachers, curriculum designers, and researchers. Researchers may carry out comprehensive studies using metaphor as an investigating tool to better understand both students and teachers’ perceptions of the teachers’ roles. The results will help develop comprehensive and inclusive methods of teaching. Larger samples with variables such as gender, age, different locations, and proficiency of participants should be taken into consideration during future studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina Zhao ◽  
Peter Thomas ◽  
Lingling Zhang

AbstractAll human being’s ways of living, working and studying were significantly impacted by the Covid-19 in 2020. In China, the Ministry of Education reacted fast in ensuring that primary school students could learn online at home by promoting the Sky Class program from February 2020. Educators, parents, and students all faced the challenges of adapting to new online teaching and learning environments. In this small-scale case study, Sky Class’s content and the participants’ experiences, will be presented. Four primary school teachers and five primary school students and their parents participated in three-rounds of interviews sharing their perspectives and experiences of online learning. The study showed that the students gained more parental support and that they benefited from using multimedia functions, like replay, in their Sky Classes. However, the majority of participants reported that the students learnt less. By mapping the learning activities and themes from Sky Class against Cope and Kalantzis’ e-learning ecologies, our study found that only ubiquitous learning and multimodal meaning were achieved. We suggest the reason may be that high cognitive learning was not achieved due to less teachers’ supervision, lack of interaction, delayed feedback, shorter learning times and communication. In conclusion, innovative pedagogies, which can foster different types of learning from the e-learning ecologies may overcome the negative aspects reported about Sky Class. Further research is required for implementing online technology as a catalyst for educational change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Alireza Bonyadi ◽  
Mehdi Kheyrollahi Kalvanagh ◽  
Minoo Bonyadi

Abstract Feasibility of maintaining an educational sustainable development (ESD) depends on exploring teachers’ concepts on their common practices in classroom settings. Speakers in multilingual contexts commonly switch their codes, languages, during their numerous social interactions. Nowadays, the phenomena, code switching, has expanded to cover any situation in which speakers switch from one accepted code into another. Through this perspective, various studies have been conducted to investigate different aspects of code-switching in EFL classrooms. The present study qualitatively investigated teachers’ perceptions on code-switching in their classrooms addressing two research questions, namely what types of code-switching EFL teachers were practicing in EFL classrooms and what were their perceptions on their code-switching. Four EFL teachers participated in the study. The analysis of the data collected through manual and electronic observations as well as structured interviews, indicated that intra-sentential and inter-sentential types of code-switching were practised throughout the classroom teaching processes. The main motives for resorting to code-switching were found to be EFL students’ lack of linguistic proficiency, keeping solidarity with the students and managing the classrooms.


Author(s):  
Cyndrella V S

This study aims to find out the effectiveness of technology based online teaching paradigm. The recent unprecedented outbreak of coronavirus did really narrate the harsh realities of life that human beings should adapt to. One among them was the need to adapt to techno-savvy accomplishments. With the outbreak of this epidemic, there has been significant surge in the usage of all digital platforms like language apps, virtual tutorials, video conferencing tools and online learning software’s. All schools are shut and nearly 1.2 billion children are forced to adapt to this harsh reality of online digital platform. Some believe that this online platform would develop a new hybrid model of education with some significant technological benefits, while some others pose the challenges involved in going digitalized. However the students are the ultimate victims who are going to face the consequences of online teaching pedagogy, be it favorable or unfavorable. Thus this study aims to find out the acceptance and effectiveness of online teaching from the part of students. The reflections and viewpoints of students are analyzed to find out the level of confidence and acceptance with regard to large scale online teaching. The test results prove that an established and completed system of IT infrastructure and internet connectivity for all students could pave a way for continuous online learning in the coming years.


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