LANGUAGE TEACHING THROUGH THE 'BLACK SCREEN': IMPLICATIONS OF AN EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING CONTEXT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the experience of language teaching and learning in a radical way. Instructors are faced with the challenge of fully face-to-face teaching to carrying out online lessons exclusively, to re-designing teaching materials and to making urgent use of new technological tools in order to establish a flow transition. However, the current conditions of the pandemic have officially "legitimised" a new type of teaching in a mandatory and imperative way, that of emergency distance teaching in an online environment. This pilot study explores the views of five language teachers in Higher Education (HE) on how their teaching practices changed in the context of remote learning in the fall semester of 2020. In particular, emphasis is placed on the students’ practice of language skills, particularly on writing, and on the pedagogic character of language teaching and learning under the current circumstances.The study aims to explore the following two research questions: 1. which student language skills have been most affected in distance emergency teaching in an online environment, according to the teachers 2. to what extent language learning is pedagogically achieved in distance emergency teaching in an online environment. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were conducted individually from which issues related to the alteration of the pedagogy of foreign language learning in an emergency remote teaching in an online environment were elicited. Data analysis showed that writing is the most-affected skill under the new circumstances, as teachers are no longer able to detect their students' weaknesses. In addition, there is a significant reference to the "black screen" phenomenon which refers to the black screen of Zoom, the videoconferencing software tool through which lessons take place. The participants in the present study did not choose the specific model but, instead, were forced to adapt to the new learning and teaching conditions, therefore, this raises questions about the teachers’ technology knowledge, inexperience with some tools and independence on colleagues for support. Analysis reveals a profound distance between teachers and students, since face-to-face interaction is intermittently disrupted. Also, although teachers continue to enrich their lesson in a multimodal way, they are often forced to become more explanatory since, as they revealed, they "lose" students in the process and also many metalinguistic elements of the lesson are lost. One of the issues brought to light by this study is that further empirical research, based on students' views, is needed to evaluate more fully the conditions of emergency remote language teaching in an online environment. It would be enlightening to see if students' views reinforce or contradict those of teachers. We also need to research the subject anthropologically and psychologically to investigate some of the students' behaviours more thoroughly, to see what pushes them to "hide" behind the screen and to study the security provided by the screen in relation to their weaknesses. Finally, it would be useful in the future to conduct more interviews with language teachers for a wider range of perspectives that can enrich the topic of foreign language teaching in an emergency remote language teaching environment.