Digital language teaching after COVID-19: what can we learn from the crisis?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting school closures have confronted the educational sector with numerous challenges. This study focuses on how teachers faced these challenges and examines what we can learn from the crisis for prospective digitally-enhanced English language teaching (ELT) and teacher education. It follows a qualitative research design and is based on semi-structured interviews with 20 foreign language teachers. The transcripts were analysed using qualitative content analysis to investigate teachers’ perspectives on their work during the pandemic and to describe needs concerning their professionalisation. First results suggest that Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) needs to be integrated better in teacher education to foster teachers’ competences for teaching languages online.