Challenges of online language teaching - useful applications and platforms [articol]

Abstract

Even though online teaching is not a novelty, the year of 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic has brought numerous challenges to the educational system of many countries. Online teaching has turned from a variant into the main way of teaching. Every teacher had to face different changes in the educational process, methods, techniques, and tools. The paper discusses the main challenges of teachers, especially of language teachers, such as the switch from face-to-face classes to online classes with different ways of keeping the attention of students and turning the cameras on, computer literacy, knowledge and access to different platforms and applications, as well as lack of proper equipment. All these aspects as well as others were taken into consideration through a questionnaire consisting of nine questions administered to 62 teachers of various subject matters, 40 of them being language teachers. The questionnaire resulted into various useful suggestions for online classes and revealed numerous effective platforms and applications, with a brief description of their main features.