Teachers’ Challenges in Teaching Online English to Young Learners: A Case Study in Pandemic Era

Abstract

This study aims to explore the challenges of primary school teachers in teaching online English to young learners in the pandemic era and teachers’ views toward teaching online English. The teachers also provide the solutions to overcome the problems. This is a qualitative research that employs a case study as the approach. The data are obtained through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 20 English teachers of primary schools. The results show many challenges emerged from three sides: instructional activity, time management, and student assessment. Challenges of instructional activity cover students’ motivation, English levels of student proficiency, communication, cooperative learning, and teaching writing. Time management challenges include having a limited amount of time and providing feedback. Meanwhile, student assessments assess students’ attitudes and cognitive skills. This study suggests the administrators and authorities of education policymakers evaluate the guidelines to enhance the quality of online teaching, especially for elementary schools.

Investigating EFL Kindergarten Teachers’ Media and Challenges in Teaching Vocabulary

“…Many factors can influence the way teachers manage the class, such as limited time and access and the influence of past teaching experience. This finding supports the results of Fahriany et al (2022) and Pertiwi et al (2020) that classroom management is a teacher's issue in teaching young learners.…”

“…Aside from Nunan's point of view, the researcher reviewed several related studies and found three potential challenges teachers face in teaching English (vocabulary) to foreign learners, including young learners. Those challenges are student-related issues, such as (1) students' attitude and students' proficiency (see Abrar, 2016;Brining, 2015;Fahriany et al, 2022;Musarrat, 2011;Widodo & Dewi, 2019), (2) teacher-related issues, such as teachers' professionalism, teachers' proficiency, and teachers' attitude (see Elhamdi & Hezam, 2020;Fahriany et al, 2022;Pertiwi et al, 2020), and (3) institutional issue, such as lack of proper teaching facility (see Abrar, 2016;Widodo & Dewi, 2019).…”

Teachers’ difficulties and strategies in teaching reading online under text-based approach

“…In the research conducted by Ragawanti (2019), she found that the difficulty of implementing TBL was the number of stages in which the teachers needed help managing their time due to various activities. It is in line with Fahriany et al, (2022) that online learning creates challenges in time management influenced by limited time. Before the online learning era, such a problem existed already.…”