Envisioning Online Language Teaching in Pakistan’s Context

Lessons Learnt from Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Covid 19 impacted several social groups, including English language teachers in Pakistan’s context. English language teachers encountered several issues due to the emergency shift from on-campus to online teaching mode during Covid 19. The current study was a case study that mainly investigated the university English language teachers’ challenges in online teaching during the lockdown using Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) to understand language teachers' challenges. TPACK is the effectiveness of lesson delivery with the help of technology (Koehler et al., 2013). The current study also explored how university language teachers handled the arising challenges and the areas of improvement they suggested for future online language education in Pakistan. Three language teachers from a public sector university in Punjab were recruited to collect data. The data was collected through class observations in nine lessons taught by the three participant teachers and by conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis was conducted following Braun and Clarke (2006). The findings suggested that the key challenges included were (a) accessibility to technology, (b) pedagogical challenges, and (c) learners' behaviour towards language learning. This study gives some practical suggestions for successful online language education in the future.