“Unmute, please!’’: Tertiary Lecturers’ Perceptions on Emergency Remote English Language Teaching During COVID-19 Pandemics

Abstract

The disruption of the education system caused by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has altered teaching processes forever, thus transforming the existing teaching/learning contexts and their relevance. Given that instructors are key bearers of the educational process, the perception of their teaching experience during the pandemic is vital to understanding the challenges that emerged throughout the process. This paper reports on the experiences of English as a foreign language (EFL) higher education lecturer (n=89) of their emergency remote English language teaching (ERELT) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of the research was to investigate how EFL lecturers assess their own instruction and relationship with students within their ERELT, and how much their teaching in ERELT differed from regular teaching conditions. Under the computer-mediated communication theory framework, the study has adopted a mix-methods research design and the data were collected through a questionnaire. The results imply that the use of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) significantly surged in the ERELT as compared to regular teaching conditions. The teaching process was assessed as a dynamic, resourceful, and stressful process, which, judging by the communicational goals, appeared to be less interactive than more traditional face-to-face instruction, causing the relationship between students and instructors to worsen to a certain extent.