Rethinking language education after the experience of covid E-Book

Frank Heyworth

• Herausgeber: Council of Europe
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 171

Beschreibung

This publication offers both a timely reflection on the challenges faced and the approaches developed over the course of the pandemic and a look into the future at ways in which the skills and insights gained may bring about beneficial lasting changes in the teaching and learning of languages.

Leseprobe

 

RETHINKING

LANGUAGE EDUCATION

AFTER THE EXPERIENCE

OF COVID

 

Final report

 

An initiative

of the Professional Network Forum

of the European Centre for Modern Languages

of the Council of Europe

 

Contents

Click here to see the whole table of contents, or go on the « Table of contents » option of your eReader.

Foreword

In March 2020, the world as we knew it seemed to come a standstill. Predictability and routine were replaced by uncertainty and fear. Knowledge and skills developed over a lifetime no longer seemed to serve us so well in this eerie new context. Things we had taken for granted were brought into question and carefully laid plans thrown out the window - which was now open for increasingly long periods during the day! Incarcerated in our homes, we wondered whether we would ever get back to our previous lives and why we had ever complained about them in the first place. When we did dare to switch on the media, we were confronted with only depressing headlines. We waited and hoped for a miracle solution – not really knowing what that might be or how long it could take.

We comforted ourselves that, no matter what part of the world we lived in, we were now all in the same boat – weren’t we? Well, not really, the injustices and inequalities were only amplified for the not so well off, often confined to cramped accommodation, and needing to share the means and technology to access and communicate with the ‘outside’ world.

School buildings remained quiet and empty – devoid of the life and energy which had once made them special and, sometimes at least, joyful places! And yet, in this strange atmosphere, behind the scenes, human creativity was sparking into action. Suddenly, technology which had sometimes been regarded as the preserve of ‘specialists’ and avoided by those who felt ill-prepared, was not only easily accessible but enabled us all to do things in different and sometimes better ways. The skills we had thought were no longer of use, now seemed like they might again be relevant after all, if we could just dust them off and adjust them to the new reality. By adapting and daring to be adventurous, we found we were able to achieve results we didn’t think were possible only a few weeks previously. We shared our experiences of what worked well and perhaps not so well with others. We were also inspired by others’ successes and not so afraid of failures which could always be blamed on the technology or the unfamiliar situation we were facing.

There were many tragic losses and setbacks, and when we are reminded of this strange and almost surreal situation which occurred just a short time ago, we sometimes find ourselves trying to push it out of our thoughts. We managed to get through it and we have moved on - the fear and uncertainty we felt at the time have been replaced by new challenges as well as the anxiety and pain caused by the latest man-made horrors facing us. Yet, it is only by looking back that we can hope to move forward. Now is exactly the time when we should look back and reflect on what we achieved and what we can learn from this painful chapter in our lives - so that when the next crisis inevitably arises, we not only struggle through, but tackle it with confidence and aspire to emerge stronger as a result.

“Rethinking language education after the experience of Covid” offers not only a reflection on the challenges faced and the approaches developed over the course of the pandemic but a look into the future at ways in which the skills and insights gained may bring about beneficial lasting changes in the teaching and learning of languages.

We are extremely grateful to the contributors to this initiative who took on this huge endeavour at the height of the pandemic. Through contact with teachers, learners and policy makers from all over Europe, they have succeeded in developing a most valuable publication that should serve to inform and stimulate discussion among all stakeholders in language education for many years to come.

The ECML Secretariat

Introduction and executive summary

FrankHeyworth

Background

The Covid pandemic has been a unique and testing experience for everyone. It has had a significant impact on many aspects of life, including language learning and teaching. In this publication we provide insights into how language learners and teachers have lived and worked through the pandemic – the long school closures, remote learning, social distancing, mask wearing, isolation – and we reflect on what lessons can be drawn from this for the future of language education.

For some teachers, adapting to the constraints of the Covid emergency has been a positive experience, as illustrated by comments made in response to a large-scale survey:

Speaking from personal experience, after over 30 years of teaching face-to-face, the transfer to online teaching has forced me to re-evaluate a lot of what I do in class and provided an opportunity for creativity which has been beneficial to me and, I hope, to learners. I have developed a new set of skills and finally taken on board the enormous potential of the internet as a resource. This is also true for the majority of my colleagues.

But this wasn’t true for everyone:

The pandemic has highlighted the difficulties in social and educational backgrounds for the less privileged. Programmes for the integration of students from different backgrounds (refugees, immigrants) have come to a stop. Education has become largely out of reach for those with financial difficulties, who receive practically no help at all, apart from the efforts of teachers, who have been left to their own devices to do their best and are at the receiving end of society’s censure.

In the publication we attempt to find a balance between acknowledging and analysing the challenges on the one hand, and identifying the positive lessons that can be drawn for the future of language education in normal circumstances and under the constraints of a future emergency, on the other.

The initiative was launched in autumn 2020 when three founder members of Eaquals, Peter Brown, Richard Rossner and Frank Heyworth, recognised that the consequences of Covid could be far-reaching for language education. Eaquals is one of the members of the ECML’s Professional Network Forum (PNF), so they contacted the ECML with the idea of carrying out a survey into the impact of the pandemic. The ECML welcomed the proposal and suggested that it should be broadened to include a wide spectrum of the language education community through involving both the ECML’s PNF and members of the ECML’s Governing Board. This led to the formation in the autumn of 2020 of an international project group composed of eight experts:

Representing the PNF:

Frank Heyworth, Richard Rossner and Peter Brown, Eaquals – Fostering Excellence in Language Education

Bernd Rüschoff, AILA – the International Association of Applied Linguistics

Sabina Schaffner, CercleS - the European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education

Representing the ECML Governing Board:

Pille Põiklik, the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research

Bronka Straus, the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport

Having recognised the potential importance of the initiative, the European Commission agreed to cofinance it within the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Commission and the ECML, “Innovative methodologies and assessment in language learning”.

The activities and achievements of the initiative: 2021

The initiative lasted from autumn 2020 until December 2022. As indicated in the image below, it involved a varied series of actions spread over more than two years.

The initial survey

The first step in the initiative was to gather information and opinions from teachers about what they had experienced – and were at that time still experiencing – during the pandemic. A questionnaire was designed in late 2020 and sent out through the ECML mailing list and website in February 2021. The survey, described in detail in Part 1 of this publication, included closed questions about how schools and teachers had coped with the pandemic and the closures of schools, with an emphasis on the challenges of remote and socially distanced teaching. The survey also provided opportunities for respondents to express their views in free text about the challenges, the difficulties and the positive opportunities afforded by the unfamiliar experiences.

There were 1735 responses to the questionnaire, more than expected, with respondents from 41 countries, although just over half came from two countries, Greece and Romania. An initial analysis task was to check whether this imbalance of countries affected the validity and reliability of the survey; in fact, the results, whether with or without those from Greece and Romania, were practically identical. An initial detailed summary of the results is available here on the ECML website. It bears witness to teachers’ concerns about their work during the pandemic in the periods when schools were closed. These included technical aspects such as:

how to manage the technology of distance learning and remote interaction with learners

the challenges posed by the difficulty of carrying out reliable assessment.

But more personal and emotional worries centred around the wellbeing (or lack of wellbeing) of both learners and teachers were also expressed. These concerns included:

the psychological effects of isolation on learners

for teachers, the loss of contact with colleagues

the discomfort and alienation of days passed in front of a computer screen

The different phases of the initiative

Overall, the responses to this survey provide a very rich and varied record of how the pandemic has been experienced by teachers, together with an extensive collection of their opinions and feelings about it. These responses formed the basis for the further activities: the first webinar, two think tanks, the 2021 colloquium, and the 2022 learners’ survey.

The 2021 webinar and the two think tanks

The first dissemination of the results was via a webinar ‘The future of language education –learning lessons from the pandemic’ - held at the end of April 2021. It was clearly a topic which was close to the preoccupations of the language teaching community. Some 1,500 people took part in the webinar directly, and the YouTube recording has been viewed 4,300 times. The webinar was followed by two online think tanks held in May and September 2021. In these, members of the PNF joined selected respondents to the survey in analysing and evaluating the results of the survey, with an emphasis on defining the challenges faced and the positive lessons for language education to be drawn from them. Outcomes of the think tanks included a decision to collect case studies from survey respondents who had given particularly interesting responses to the open questions.

Another decision was to develop discussion papers to help teachers, heads of schools and educational authorities to manage language education in the post-pandemic period and in future emergencies. Participants in the think tanks identified the issue of assessment and the problem of slippage in standardised exam levels as especially critical challenges. Another key discussion centred on the experience of schools in which remote and face-to-face learning were combined during the pandemic and the possible value of hybrid approaches to learning. A summary report of the think tanks is to be found here.

Further development of the initiative in 2021

Work on the initiative continued throughout 2021. Major tasks included the collection, analysis and editing of 23 case studies and the production of a leaflet summarising the most important aspects of the survey. In the leaflet six “burning” issues are described:

Providing technology and using it equitably

Exploiting the advantages of online materials

Choosing methods which fit new challenges

Adapting assessment

Supporting learners and favouring their autonomy

Supporting teachers

Meanwhile, Bernd Rüschoff and Peter Brown continued the statistical analysis of the teachers’ survey, using corpus analysis to check the reliability and validity of the conclusions to be drawn from it. This analysis enabled us to refine the results and to pick out the key issues more clearly. The results were presented in the second think tank as input to the discussions on the lessons to be learned.

The case studies

In the open text responses to the survey there were many interesting comments from the teachers, in which they briefly described creative and original teaching approaches developed to cope with the challenges of lockdown. Respondents were invited to describe their initiatives in more detail in “case studies”. The 16 case studies demonstrate an impressive range of creative activities devised by teachers to engage their learners in spite of the difficult circumstances of lockdown and remote learning. They include exchanges between schools in Italy and Taiwan, interactive discussions of mental health issues related to Covid, studies of literature and collaborative storytelling, as well as more traditional language related activities. In all the case studies, digital resources and video are used inventively to bring learners together in cooperative ventures which contributed to combatting the isolation of long periods of lockdown. A further set of seven case studies was produced following a ‘Relating language curricula, tests and examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference’ (RELANG) workshop in Cyprus. These deal with issues related to language assessment. The case studies are described in detail in Part 2 of the publication.

The 2021 colloquium

In December 2021, a colloquium was held (in Graz and remotely) to look back on the work done during the year and to debate its relevance to the future of language education. The aims were to address these issues:

What insights had been gained from using radically different modes of language education – remote, hybrid and socially distanced – during the Covid pandemic?

How can the challenges of examinations and assessment in such situations be overcome?

What innovative kinds of support for learners and teachers were developed?

What specific challenges arose in relation to ensuring inclusive language education for all?

Do we now need a new kind of “educational literacy”?

In addition to the activities of the initiative, the colloquium focused on other activities of the ECML, especially the Training and Consultancy work on RELANG and on ‘Supporting multilingualclassrooms’. The colloquium also featured reports on work done on the impact of Covid by the European Commission and the OECD given by representatives of both organisations. The representatives of the OECD presented the PISA response to the experiences of Covid. One of the case studies (collaboration between a school in Italy and another in Taiwan) was presented, and four case study authors provided two-minute video descriptions of their work. Recordings of these interventions and other colloquium sessions can be found here.

Although there were no formal conclusions to the colloquium, there was consensus on a number of points:

There would be formidable challenges for language education in the post-pandemic period:

Making up for the loss of learning during the periods of lockdown

Recalibrating the levels of public examinations where these had shown “slippage” as a result of closures, remote learning and different modes of examining

Addressing the problems related to learner – and teacher – wellbeing.

The experience of remote learning and school lockdowns has prompted teachers to be innovative and inventive in ways that can usefully be transferred to “normal” teaching:

A better understanding of the potentialities of digital learning and the creation of resources which enhance learning

The development of methods and approaches to teaching which promote creative cooperation and collaboration among learners

An awareness of the potential benefits of hybrid learning

A hypothesis that to implement the changes a new form of “educational literacy”1 may be needed.

There was consensus, too, that the initiative should be continued into 2022, and that one of the priorities should be to complement the survey of teachers’ views by finding out what learners thought and felt about their own experiences during the pandemic.

The activities and achievements of the initiative: 2022

There were some changes in the team for 2022: Bronka Straus and Sabina Schaffner withdrew because of other professional commitments, and Christine Lechner, an ECML project coordinator, joined the team. Richard Rossner took over the coordination of the initiative from Frank Heyworth.

The principal aim in 2022 was to complement the teacher survey by giving learners an opportunity to express their views about their experiences of language learning during the pandemic and to collect their opinions about how these experiences might have an influence on their future language learning. It was decided that, rather than carrying out a simple survey using a questionnaire, it would be better to integrate the questionnaire with a learning activity. Learners were invited to reflect on and discuss with their classmates what they thought and how they felt about the periods of lockdown and remote teaching and learning. A description of the suggested lesson ideas can be found here in the resources section of the initiative’s website and in Part 1 of this publication.

The ‘learners’voices’ surveys

The learner survey was carried out in two phases. First there was a pilot phase in May and June 2022 involving 23 classes and 276 learners from 5 countries. The aim of this was to test whether the planned activities and the related questionnaire worked with learners, which was confirmed by the results. This was followed up by a more extensive survey based on the class activities with around 1100 secondary students from 9 European countries. Teachers of the participating classes were also asked to answer a simplified version of the initial teachers’ survey.

Although absences through Covid were still affecting many schools, those who responded to the 2022 survey of learners and teachers were in schools which were working more or less normally; this meant that respondents were looking back at the experiences of lockdown, comparing them with face-to-face schooling and reflecting on what impact they might have on future teaching and learning. The key aim of the surveys was to find valid answers to the questions below:

For learners

What helped or hindered you in your language learning?

What worked well and should be maintained?

What didn’t work well and should be discarded in your view?

Do you have pointers for the future?

For teachers

What are the burning issues arising from your experiences during the Covid pandemic?

Has anything changed since lockdowns ended and, if so, what?

Can you build on your experiences during the pandemic in your future teaching?

Do you have pointers for the future?

The most important conclusion to be drawn from the results of the learners’ discussions is that learners clearly like being at school. They, of course, appreciated being able to sleep a little longer and not having to wear school uniform, but these were seen as minor advantages in comparison with the disadvantages of loss of contact with friends and the social aspects of school.

I felt sad, isolated and lonely. My eyesight got worse and I need glasses. I missed all my friends. Sometimes I didn’t understand what the teacher wanted me to do. At school I just ask the teacher and my friends and it’s clear.

We also disliked the cerfew (sic.), wearing masks and feeling worse because of the extensive use of computers and lack of human contact (sicknesses, headaches, sore eyes, depression).

We also missed each other because in school we learn a lot from each other and help each other when we do not know something regarding homework or things that we do in lessons. Though we sometimes preferred distant learning because it is less stressful than classroom learning we are more happy being in school.

These quotations from learners encapsulate the key findings of the surveys. A webinar in May 2022 provided a provisional summary of the results of the pilot learners’ survey:

The learners want to be and learn in school rather than remotely. This point-of-view received almost unanimous support from secondary school language learners. It was mentioned repeatedly: irrespective of the question, the issue was raised nevertheless.

The impact on learners’ wellbeing (also a key issue for teachers): about two thirds of the learners reported suffering from some form of social discomfort and stress arising from one or more factors, such as the socially distanced classroom, distance delivery, the wearing of masks, timetabling restrictions leading to lack of time, isolation, and resulting demotivation; whilst a quarter of all respondents reported more severe forms including some statements that were deemed potentially clinically relevant by a doctor.

During the webinar, other schools and teachers were invited to sign up to participate in the main survey in May-June 2022.

A systematic analysis of the results of the surveys

During the two years of the initiative a very considerable body of data has been collected – 5 surveys in all (3 for teachers, 2 for learners) plus 23 case studies, with a total of 4,000 responses, including a large corpus of open text comments. The team felt it was imperative that this treasure trove should be analysed scientifically and methodically to make sure that we avoided drawing superficial conclusions. This work was