Technology: Language teachers’ digital and navigating skills in emergency education

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced school administrators and practitioners including teachers to find quick ways to mitigate the pandemic impacts on education including language education. When the pandemic hit, all parties were groping for new ways to conduct education (teaching and learning) in the emergency period. This research was intended to find out what skills teachers need to quickly transform themselves from the traditional to tech-rich teaching from home (TFH) in the pandemic outbreak with total school closure like that of the Covid-19. This research was descriptive quantitative with surveys and focus group discussions (FGD) with university teachers of different foreign languages to attain data. The results show that with different levels of digital and navigations skills, teachers have to be trained to attain the threshold level of various teachnological savviness to quickly serve. A diagram of a digital skills list is presented with hardware tools skills (skills to use gadgets) as the initial emergent skills to acquire and the learning tools skills (skills to access sources) as the last skills to train. All these trainings have to be carried out very quickly, and an around-the-clock mentoring system to give assistance to a teacher in an emergency teachnological situation must be provided. The findings should provide ideas as to how schools have to respond to a pandemic situation like the Covid-19 when a similar outbreak occurs in the future.