With COVID-19 continuing to disrupt the world, education systems had to adapt their mode of teaching to respond to local lockdowns and school closures across the world. Language education was no exception. What are the effects of this disruption on language education? What opportunities has the educational community had and what risks is it facing? This post points out that while teachers have adapted exceptionally well to the new reality in order to provide continuity for their students, educational systems still face considerable gaps in the design of the learning experience – gaps that have not been bridged since the beginning of the pandemic. Perhaps more alarmingly, the crisis has exposed existing inequalities in education – from access to the internet and digital devices to access to quality online courses.
On 11 December 2020, Daniel Xerri and I appeared on Teachers’ Coffee, a radio programme run by the great George Kokolas and Natassa Manitsa from Express Publishing. There was no particular agenda and although we knew we would be asked questions about language learning during COVID-19, George had insisted that we look at the radio interview as a friendly chat over coffee. And so we did 🙂
Listen to the interview
Grab a coffee and listen to us talk about the impact of COVID-19 on language education as well as our suggestions for the way forward. George and Natassa created a really friendly and relaxed atmosphere and with both of them on the decks, you will also listen to some great music in the background. If you prefer to read it instead, find the written interview below the recording.
Read the interview
The interview started with a friendly chat among the four of us with George and Natassa referring to our recently published book English for 21st Century Skills as a best-seller among Express Publishing’s teacher reference books. Indeed, readers’ appreciation posts have been flooding social media in the last six months, something that keeps making us all very happy. This brought us to the main interview, with George and Natassa taking turns to ask questions:
George: We had a conversation with both of you on separate occasions back in Spring. After 8 months of “teaching through a pandemic mode”, how are you assessing education now compared to then? Are we making any progress, maybe a transition or a change of mindset among teachers? Or does everything remain the same?
Sophia: Absolutely, I think the ELT community made tremendous progress regarding remote teaching and the use of technology in general. Of course, we are talking about those who were able to move online, because we can’t assume that all teachers in the world were able to do that, there are huge digital divides between those who have access to the internet and devices and those who do not. So those who did move online, made tremendous progress. We all remember how the transition from face-to-face to online happened. Within a week or perhaps shorter than this. So, teachers and managers had to dive in and learn how to teach remotely very fast simply because there was no other way. It had to be done. So the teachers were brave, exceptionally brave, and all the educational community, managers, administrators, and students – they dived in although it was a steep learning curve for them and they provided continuity. Some better than others – but this doesn’t really matter because there were differences in skills, internet connectivity, equipment, training.
So, teachers are now in a better position to use technology to assist language learning. And I think that teachers are lifelong learners in general. They are exceptional people. Honestly, I don’t think you can be a teacher and survive the realities of the classroom if you are not a learner yourself. I’m not talking just about technology here; I’m referring to lifelong learning in general.
So yes, it’s been a huge change of mindset and teachers moved from I “can’t” to “I can” with regards to technology, which is an incredible achievement. However, I think there is a catch here, and I would also like to refer to the negatives – unless Daniel wants to add something here. Daniel, what do you think?
Daniel: In fact, I was going to add some negatives to what you were saying. I fully concur with you that teachers around the world, the majority of them, have been doing a brilliant job in adapting to this reality. But what we’re also now becoming aware of is the effect of the pandemic on the education of so many learners around the world. We know, for example, that learning and development have been interrupted and disrupted for millions of students around the world. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, maintains that reduced learning has likely impeded student learning, and it has also affected the development of the whole child. Why is this? Well, we know that a lockdown was imposed in many countries. We know that this lockdown in certain cases forced students to adapt to a reality that they were not used to, and they had to do that very quickly. The teachers had to adapt very quickly as well in many cases with a lack of support. And even now that things are getting back to normal in many countries, we still have an issue with the length of lesson time. For example, if I look at my own country, many students are being provided with shorter lessons. What will be the effect of this on these learners, given that education in the early phases of a person’s life is of crucial importance and has a huge impact on the development of the individual?
Moreover, what is also clear is that whilst many students have adapted and have ultimately continued with their education, there have been many thousands of students who have given in to absenteeism. They haven’t been online attending lessons, they haven’t been engaging with remote learning with the same kind of engagement that we hope for. So most often what happens is that the people who are ultimately the victims of opportunity gaps – low-income students,for example – they have been put at a bigger disadvantage because of the pandemic when compared to their better off peers. Sophia pointed out that one of the most critical opportunity gaps is the uneven access to technological devices and access to the Internet, which are vital for remote learning. In fact, a recent study by Human Rights Watch on the African context shows how many thousands of students in different African countries have suffered because of the pandemic, suffered in terms of their education. Existing inequalities have been exacerbated because of that, especially when it comes to girls’ education, interestingly enough.
Sophia: Daniel, thank you so much for all this because sometimes I feel lonely when I talk about the negative side of this transition. I fully agree with you and just want to add that the challenge ahead of us is to move away from the emergency remote teaching that we’re still in – it may be a more mature phase, we are not where we were when we started back in March but we’re still in some kind of emergency mode because there are still gaps with the pedagogy, there are gaps with the materials, there are gaps with students’ learning as Daniel rightly said, and there are also gaps with teachers’ workload; teachers are still struggling and juggling, and are overworked. Also, students’ distraction is considerable, and I hear people say: “Students are distracted online” or “Students don’t like learning online”. And my answer to this is that this is NOT online learning. This is still emergency remote teaching. Which may be an excellent approach for the crisis, but it should not be the new paradigm of online education. So, the reason why I’m saying that, and I assume Daniel as well, is that it is understandable why all this happened because change during a pandemic is not easy. Let’s face it. But the challenge ahead of us is to bridge the gap between this situation and more pedagogically sound and inclusive online learning solutions.
Daniel: And in terms of the gap, if I may add to what Sophia has been saying, yes, it’s vital to bridge the gap, but a question that comes to mind is whether governments around the world will have enough money to do that. One of the biggest issues in 2021 is going to be, how are we going to finance education? Prior to the pandemic OECD countries as an average spent 11% of their budgets on education, but because of the pandemic a lot of money had to be funnelled into the health sector and the economy in order to allow the economy to come back on its feet and to deal with the immediate problems of the health sector. So, what is going to happen in the immediate future? If there isn’t enough money for general education, not only language education, not only ELT, but general education more broadly. And this is not only being said by the OECD. In fact, a recent policy note published by the World Bank shows that one of the biggest effects of the pandemic on countries’ education is going to be how much they are able to spend on education.
Natassa: Well, it’s really nice that you have decided to touch all this because we are used to listening to people making really impressive comments as far as online education is concerned, and though you mentioned that there has been progress between the previous lockdown and now, and Sophia said the situation might be slightly better, I hear you are both very sceptical towards this new era of online teaching. What really attracted my attention is the fact that girls have to face quite a lot of problems as Daniel mentioned, especially in Third World countries. I will just add something more positive here. I’ve heard that generally, the global economy might rise after March. This is according to the latest studies that I have seen as far as the financial side is concerned but I’m not sure whether education is going to benefit from that. But let’s be more specific. If we were to compare remote learning in spring and winter 2020, what would be your review?
Sophia: I think that teachers managed the impossible and they are now in a better position to move on to the next phase. We are still in emergency remote teaching, but this is an improved version because teachers are more confident and more experienced, and they can take risks and innovate. However, if ELT and language learning remains in this emergency phase, if we normalise this kind of teaching then there will be issues. Daniel, for example, talked about shorter lessons in Malta, and I’ve heard that elsewhere. Why? Why shorter lessons? Have they been supplemented with asynchronous learning and that’s the reason they’re shorter? Is the asynchronous learning designed according to how people learn online, or we just threw some PDFs onto a learning management system? So how was this done? So decisions have been made without serious consideration about proper online education and digital pedagogies So I want to flag something up here. If this continues, we are going to see some kind of ‘uberisation’ of ELT – Nik Peachey has mentioned this too using the term uberification. Just like Uber managed to sneak in and offer a less quality service much cheaper, then we may see this ‘uberification’ of ELT, and of course because it will be online then competition will be fierce. To address this, we need to be competitive by offering a quality online programme.
Daniel already gave the bigger picture and talked about finances etc and I totally agree – but in a smaller scale school or institution, we need to educate the teacher with quality teaching and quality online support. We cannot leave the teacher alone to build the plane while they are flying it. This happened back in March but now we need to move to something more grounded. But for this to be achieved we need quality training, not emergency remote training which is quite common lately. Suddenly, there are many people sharing content online, presenting about teaching online, and some of this content is very good, but some is extremely poor, and we need an extra layer of critical thinking to approach it. I’m not talking about teachers presenting what they do in the classroom, best practices etc. This is absolutely fantastic. I’m talking about people who think that they have found a golden opportunity here, and just because they have a Zoom account and did some emergency remote teaching themselves during the pandemic – perhaps they also did a How to teach with technology course 10 years ago – they are now giving training sessions about how to teach online, some of them charge them as well. What I want to say here to teachers is that they need to be extra careful because most of this training is emergency remote training and it won’t take them where they want to go.
Daniel: That’s very true Sophia and you’ve talked quite a lot about this in other fora, and you’ve experienced yourself as a professional and as an expert in online learning and the use of technology. What’s happening in different contexts around the world when it comes to providing teachers with the training that they so need? So yes, teachers during the pandemic have stated that they require training in the use of ICT, for example. But the irony is that the kinds of programmes, the kinds of courses that they enroll on are not always the ones that they find most valuable. In fact, a recent study shows that the professional development programmes that teachers consider to have the most impact are the ones based on strong subject and curriculum content, ones involving collaborative approaches to teaching, and incorporating active learning. But then when teachers actually follow professional development opportunities, these are most likely to consist of courses, webinars and seminars that do not have that collaborative form of professional development. So, here we have a bit of a paradox, as it were.
George: I must tell you that I’m speechless. This is one of the best interviews we’ve ever had on this programme. I think that’s a proper webinar because we’re having two experts who are so eager to share all these ideas. Thank you for speaking your mind and expressing your opinion so freely. Everything that you have pointed out makes very good sense. Let me move to the next question. What would be your ideal scenario after this pandemic? Let’s assume that COVID-19 ends in two to three months. What would the ideal educational scenario be for both of you?
Sophia: I want to believe – and I’ve said that before – that when this pandemic is behind us and we’re ready to go back to the classroom, I really hope that we won’t just go back to how things were before COVID-19. Because teachers have learned a lot along the way. So I hope that we use this knowledge and this mindset to go forward. If technology is used appropriately it can really assist education and language learning on so many levels. I’m not talking about this tool and that tool and tools everywhere. But good use of technology can promote collaboration, creativity, sharing, learning; so we need to use this knowledge to go forward, and as a digital learning specialist consulting institutions around the world, I can say that some institutions are already looking ahead and they’re not going back to how things were, and I think that this is all very positive. I just hope that it won’t just be the privileged few, but all teachers and all students will be able to not go back to how things were, but they will be able to go forward.
Daniel: Well, in terms of my wishes or expectations for the future, and if I had to focus on teachers, what I would hope for is that teachers are provided with the support to meet the social, emotional and academic needs of learners in the future if challenging circumstances continue to occur. We’re all thinking that there is going to be a post-COVID future, but as Bill Gates reminds us in his TED Talk from 2015, the future that we are all going to live through is one where our biggest enemies are going to be these pandemics that will occur every few years. Let us not forget that COVID-19 has been described as a Black Swan, an extreme condition in a VUCA world. A VUCA world means basically a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. So what I would hope for is that teachers are provided with the necessary support so that they can develop the socio-emotional competencies required in order for them to deal with these challenging scenarios that they’re going to face in the classroom and elsewhere. And that would involve being equipped with a repertoire of skills and knowledge, including mindfulness, stress management techniques, and the ability to engage in teamwork so as to solve problems more efficiently. As well as having the necessary digital literacy to adapt to such situations if they had to happen again in the future. And it’s not just me saying this. This was all pointed out in a recent special issue of the European Journal of Teacher Education, which shows that teachers during the pandemic were shocked at all levels. But at the same time, we also saw teachers finding solutions to problems, problems that they had not encountered before. Let us make sure that the teachers of tomorrow, the teachers of 2021 and the coming years are better equipped to deal with such challenging situations if they had to happen again.
Sophia A lovely wish, thank you, Daniel 🙂
Natassa: So that is amazing. I don’t want this show to end. But this has to be my last question. Since we referred to your excellent book English for 21st Century Skills I want to take the opportunity and thank the rest of the authors that contributed to this amazing project of yours. So, my next question is which 21st century skills could be the most useful to teachers to apply during the pandemic and any future pandemic that might occur?
Sophia: I think it’s all, I wouldn’t like to just pick one. I think it’s easy to get carried away and think that the skill of digital literacies is the most important. It is very important, and that’s my specialism after all, but it is not the only one. Social justice is very important too, and Daniel and I already talked about inequalities and digital divisions. Also, well-being, critical thinking, leadership, and so many more are important to keep us going. For example, the ability to step out of our comfort zone, something that teachers did to a great extent during the pandemic, and they are still doing, has nothing to do with digital literacies. It shows leadership. It shows creativity. So, during a crisis, we need them all. Our students need them all more than ever before. So, buy our book English for 21st Century Skills; that was the conclusion.
Natassa: That’s right, Sophia!
Daniel: I agree with Sophia that all of the skills mentioned in the book are vital. But perhaps the skill that I think will be most useful for teachers and students in the coming years is a skill that we didn’t include in the book. And that is adaptability. If we look at the definition provided by researchers at the University of Southern California, adaptability is about demonstrating mental agility, remaining comfortable with the ambiguous, unstructured environments that we live and work in, and being flexible in the face of continual change. If our learners and our colleagues are willing to adjust their thinking and approach challenges in new ways, in unexpected ways, then perhaps that would be highly useful for them. So, let’s hope that ELT and general education more broadly, are able to equip people with that particular skill.
The interview closed with good wishes for a Merry Christmas and a much happier new year from all four of us. A big thank you goes to Natassa and George for being such great hosts. And for playing some fascinating music throughout the interview.
Merry Christmas to you all, and a happy and safe new year ahead!
Please cite as follows:
Mavridi, S., & Xerri, D. (2020). The effects of COVID-19 on language education. Digital Pedagogy [Teachers’ Coffee radio interview]. Retrieved from https://sophiamavridi.com/covid19-language-education
Sophia Mavridi is a Digital Learning Specialist & Lecturer in English Language Teaching at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on online learning and the increasingly important role of digital literacies in education. Read more about her work here.
Daniel Xerri is a Lecturer in TESOL at the University of Malta. He is the author of many publications on different areas of education and TESOL. Further details about his talks and publications can be found here.
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