Sars-CoV-2 suddenly spread in late December 2019, forever changing people's lives all over the world. Consistent advancements have been done, especially at the medical level, to face the virus and slow it down. At the same time, schools, universities, and educational institutions have been facing hard times since the beginning of the pandemic. Teachers had to shift from face-to-face to exclusively online classes overcoming daily challenges and helping students with their subjects. This chapter aims to present the results of a study conducted during the first wave of COVID-19 concerning language teachers' perceptions of ERT in secondary schools, high schools, and universities. QUAN and QUAL data were collected and analyzed through descriptive statistics and CAQCAS. The results showed that, despite the difficulties encountered and teachers and students' frequent inability to use digital technologies, instructors at all levels believed virtual classrooms to be useful as additional support to teaching and learning.
TopIntroduction
In late December 2019, unclear news about mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in Central China, began to spread around the world, affecting public opinion until later medical investigations declared that infected cases were due to novel Coronavirus (also defined as Sars-CoV-2 or COVID-19).
One year and a half after the declaration of the coronavirus outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) (2021), 203,295,170 confirmed cases and 4,303,515 deaths are registered and, although consistent medical advancements have been accomplished and vaccines are being administered in every country, infections still occur, forcing authorities to adopt measures to try to slow them out.
In particular, during the so-called first wave, the high rate of contagiousness of COVID-19 forced the closure of schools, universities, and other educational institutes, thus providing the shift from a traditional face-to-face or blended training to exclusively online teaching practice.
According to the UNESCO report on April 1, 2021, the pandemic situation impacted 148,395,976 learners, corresponding to 8.5% of the world’s student population with 31 country-wide closures (UNESCO, 2021). Fortunately, thanks to the 4,033,274,676 vaccine doses administered (World Health Organization, 2021), the last UNESCO report on July 31, 2021 shows that – at the moment of writing – the numbers of students affected by this situation has been reduced to 31,453,440, representing 1.8% of total enrolled learners and with 8 country-wide closures.
The primary issue that educational authorities had to face during the first COVID-19 wave was to attempt to provide and meet the necessary conditions to help teachers and students adapt to remote teaching and learning (Eder, 2020). Contemporarily, teachers and educators found themselves transported to a virtual environment they were (and, sometimes, still are) not accustomed to (Teräs et al., 2020). Accordingly, one of the most difficult challenges was moving and adapting the curriculum to the online environment while trying to motivate students to do tasks and activities usually carried out at school or university using digital tools, educational videos, instructional websites, and platforms such as WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Classroom among others (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Nevertheless, even though today’s students are heavy users of new media technologies and remote learning may provide advantages − comparing to traditional face-to-face teaching − in terms of flexibility in time and place and enhancements in learners’ autonomy, it can also turn into a source of stress and anxiety. Indeed, it offers learners few opportunities to socialize (especially for those students in their freshman year of school or university), discuss with peers and teachers, experience teamwork, and is often subject to technical inconveniences that can potentially threaten online lessons along with oral and written exams.
The construction of a comfortable learning environment with a low threshold for anxiety and in which students could feel at ease represents one of the most significant aspects in L21 teaching to let learners better experience language learning activities and practice with speaking, writing, listening, and reading without forced interruptions and remote revisions.
Consequently, language teachers in the time of COVID-19 feel the necessity for supporting students balancing between the pre-existing struggles in acquiring a foreign/second language and the ones caused by what has been defined as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)2 (Hodges et al., 2020).
Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to present the results of a research regarding Secondary School, High School, and University language teachers’ perceptions of ERT around the world during the first COVID-19 wave.
In particular, the study reports the quantitative (QUAN) and qualitative (QUAL) findings from a web-based questionnaire analysing L2 teachers’ perceptions of four specific aspects: i) support from their institution at the technical and management level; ii) teachers and students’ stress level during and after lockdown; iii) the use of remote teaching; iv) prospects concerning the use of online education even after the pandemic.