Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Pandemic Times

Abstract

In general, teaching, as a multidimensional process, has always been considered as a crucial element for the society to progress. Recently, it has become the talk of the town as it is facing a challenging reality, that of virtual teaching introduced due to the pandemic precautions taken by the education bodies worldwide. It is quite obvious that extreme situations bring flashes that may blind or inspire us and this is the case in present days. We teachers, professors, and educators have spent many hours within the classroom or teaching environments and outside ruminating, pondering, discussing the best teaching methodology that inspires, draws students’ attention and enhances their involvement during teaching/learning activities; we have invested our knowledge and experience on quite a considerable number of elaborated articles, but all these years it has never crossed our mind that we as teachers will be ever faced with such crashing reality. We have always considered the introduction of technology (computers, interactive boards, etc) as an assisting tool and not as the only and most important mean of disseminating and acquiring knowledge. So, the aim of this article is to reconsider the methodology of teaching English as a foreign language and the moribund and distressed situation it has fallen into lately. How we ought to motivate students if we have to overcome the mask and computer screen obstacle?