درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

During the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty members and students had to leave their face-to-face (FTF) classes and move into emergency distance education (EDE) contexts. Due to this drastic change in the system of education, investigating the probable effects of EDE on the quality of education seems essential. As such, this study has attempted to probe the effect of EDE on the language skills of Iranian EFL students. To do so, drawing on the maximum variation sampling, the present study embarked on a qualitative descriptive research method, triangulating data through written open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect data from 170 EFL students from different universities in Iran. The sample included BA students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and English Literature, aged above 18. Using Thematic Analysis (TA), students’ responses were transcribed, codified, and interpreted. The findings of TA revealed that along with several disadvantages and challenges that Iranian EFL students experienced in EDE with regard to learning English language skills, EDE provided some opportunities and benefits for their learning. The analysis of students’ responses also indicated that they deemed speaking skill as the most negatively influenced language skill and listening skill as the most positively affected skill. Furthermore, the findings represented that most of the students held teachers and administrators responsible for the problems and challenges they experienced in EDE contexts. The findings of the present study can encourage administrators, teachers, and students to prepare themselves for EDE against the possible subsequent waves.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has brought about many changes and challenges in our lives, interactions, relationships, and modes of learning and teaching and helped us learn how to adapt ourselves to unanticipated conditions to survive. It stimulated universities, schools, and institutions of higher education to rethink and restructure their policies to find solutions to the problems as well as researchers all around the world to help educational systems get out of the mess. This study aimed to contribute to the body of literature and investigated the impacts of COVID-19 on English language teacher education. Convenience sampling was employed to recruit thirty student teachers as the participants of the study. To do the study, the author used semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews (n = 20), student teachers' reflective journals (n = 10), and his own reflective journals to collect the data. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. The findings of the study revealed that there was a shift from anomaly to congruity, student teachers saw the pandemic as an opportunity, they felt the need for technology inclusion, development, and promotion in their educational contexts, there was an urgent need to train teachers and learners to use technology in their contexts to keep the education running, and teachers had to reconstruct their identities and turn to formative assessment. The findings can contribute to the body of literature and prompt English language teacher education programs, teacher educators, administrators, teachers, and policymakers to consider the findings while they are designing, upgrading, reforming, and running their syllabi, curriculums, and programs.

The upheaval time of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of an effective way of teaching English to the front-line healthcare workers such as medical doctors and researchers with different digital-divide status, particularly in non-English-speaking countries because they were first-hand users of critical pandemic-related information in mostly-English articles published online by scientific journals. This study attempted to investigate the pedagogical effects of utilizing the two main User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms in E-learning, namely LMS vs. LXP, on the results of the Electronic Ministry of Health Language Examinations (E-MHLE) among Iranian English for Medical Purposes (EMP) learners across their digital-divide status (digital natives vs. digital immigrants) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of focus-group E-interviews were conducted to determine the reasons behind the lowest scores among the participants and to find out possible suggestions for success in high-stake E-tests. To this end, 272 EMP learners who were users of LMS and LXP were conveniently selected from a university of medical science to participate in this sequential explanatory mixed-method research. The results of descriptive and inferential statistics showed that the LXP group outperformed the LMS one in the results of E-MHLE. Moreover, the digital natives obtained higher scores than the digital immigrants in both groups but the difference was not significant in the LXP. The findings of the E-interviews were thematically analyzed and discussed. The findings of this study might offer practical and realistic benefits to the whole EMP community, particularly policymakers for the post-COVID-19 era.