Online ELT during the Covid-19 Pandemic. A Case Study on Students’ Perspectives

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has raised interest within many interdisciplinary fields. Researchers in the field of education were particularly interested in reporting teachers’ and students’ experiences (e.g., Hoti, Dragusha, and Ndou 2022) during the period of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al. 2020) and Sustained Remote Teaching (SRT) (Stewart, Baek, and Lowenthal 2022). This article aims to provide a further contribution to education studies by exploring students’ experiences in an English language course organised by an Italian University Language Centre during the 2020/21 academic year. More specifically, it focuses on how interactions were accomplished in foreign language virtual classrooms and whether students’ perceptions on online teaching have changed with SRT. Results showed that although students still preferred face-to-face lessons, they highly appreciated specific tools of online teaching (e.g., recordings) and wished they could be implemented in traditional lessons. The data also confirmed the importance of interactions in modern foreign language virtual classrooms and found that most students who had an overall negative experience with online teaching were also students who had more difficulties in interacting during classes.