Online English Classes for Bangladeshi Young Learners during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices of the Teachers and Parents

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought a dramatic change in teaching and learning around the world. Almost all educational institutions shifted to the online mode of teaching so that students do not miss any academic year. In Bangladesh, such a mode of teaching was never introduced at the mass level earlier, and that is why it was quite challenging for teachers to conduct online classes initially. In some cases, teachers who did not have a certain level of technological expertise in using online teaching platforms experienced more issues in conducting classes. This qualitative study highlights the problems that teachers and parents of nine young learners (YLs) faced during their online classes. The focused group discussion among seven English teachers and nine parents revealed that many YLs could not follow the technical instructions of the teachers well, which compelled the parents to sit beside their children constantly. Moreover, this study reports on the experience of teachers in communicating and coordinating with students on online platforms in a developing country where a full-fledged online teaching mode has not been implemented before. Such a reciprocal interaction among teachers, students, and parents in an online platform provides the scope for rethinking the “parental involvement framework of online teaching” in an English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) context, where parents’ digital skills, as well as involvement with the learners’ the learning process, affect students’ academic achievement to a great extent. The findings of the study have implications for planning online English courses for YLs in ESOL contexts such as Bangladesh, where the idea of online teaching is quite new.