Teaching foreign languages in higher education during the corona crisis

Abstract

The paper investigates conceptual and operational levels of methods applied by foreign language teachers at Polish universities under pandemic constraints. In a stable state, a method of teaching, determined by institutional standards, was characterised by the dominance of the behavioural ingredient at the conceptual level, the prominence of obligatory operational-level components, and a limited space for bottom-up influences and individual teachers’ voices to be heard. We posit that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic reversed the hierarchy and as a result, teachers have been able to exercise a significant degree of agency. To assess the potential for such a change, we conducted a voluntary survey among Polish language teachers at a tertiary level. A statistical analysis of the results demonstrated that the opportunity for insider self-reflection, offered by the crisis, may affect the conceptual focus of a teaching method as a complex system and eventually penetrate the operational level.