ENGLISH TRAINEE TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVE ON SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS LANGUAGE TEACHING

Abstract

The temporary introduction of distance education at universities owing to the pandemic leads to the necessity to develop innovative methods of on-line teaching and learning that could become an adequate alternative of on-site teacher-student interaction and improve students’ professional skills. The background of the research states that in tertiary language education whose main aim is to develop students’ professional communicative competence it is of paramount importance to combine synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction with the former creating an opportunity for live communication and immediate feedback and the latter developing students’ autonomy and being more flexible and convenient. As the two modes have different advantages the indices of their proper balance are still under discussion. The present study aims to explore English trainee teachers' ability to reflect on the ways of on-line language learning and to find out their attitude towards synchronous/asynchronous teaching. The results of the questionnaire completed by 168 students of the Faculty of Foreign Philology at H. S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University indicate that the majority of trainee teachers are on the whole satisfied with distance teaching and learning, though a great number of students consider the ratio of synchronous and asynchronous modes inappropriate. The findings of the research also suggest that trainee teachers would like more diversity in the tools used in distance education. Moreover, the more learning experience students have, the easier it is for them to adapt to different teaching conditions and the more willing they are to acquire the skills of working with various educational tools. The received data may serve as the foundation for rationalizing the existing methods and techniques to increase the efficiency of trainee teachers’ distance education.