Emergency Remote Teaching: Exploring Opportunities and Challenges of ESL Students and Teachers

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought sudden changes in the academic world. On-campus teaching and learning have become online, onscreen, and at-home, thus, the term emergency remote teaching (ERT) has emerged. While many people label this unprecedented shift in the teaching-learning situation as online learning and distance education, ERT scholars describe it as a distinct pedagogy that is far different from face-to-face delivery and not comparable to well-prepared, fully-structured online education offered in schools and universities. Since ERT is a new pedagogical shift, the researchers aimed to understand its nature by collating feedback from students and teachers in Vietnam who have been adapting ERT for two academic years. A survey among 32 ESL teachers was conducted via Google form.  Meanwhile, 71 students’ feedback was gathered through Padlet, a collaborative web platform. Both teachers’ and students’ responses were coded and arranged according to themes through thematic content analysis.  The themes were used in the identification and discussion of good practices and problems encountered during the recent ERT delivery. Results showed that most teachers considered students’ behavior, learning distractions, and class interaction as the topmost challenges in an online class while technical problems are considered the most challenging factors for online learning among students.  It is recommended that teachers use various interactive platforms in delivering a lesson, in doing formative assessments, and in motivating students.  Furthermore, teachers can make learning fun by providing more language games and by improving online class interaction.