Abstract:

On March 2020, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization estimated that 107 countries had implemented national school closures related to COVID-19, affecting 862 million children and young people, roughly half the global student population. The traditional teaching characterized by a teacher physically facing the classroom suddenly stopped, and education systems around the world were forced to switch to remote teaching. For teachers of young children who are less exposed to e-learning and still in the very fundamental stages of literacy acquisition, challenges may be unique and critical. While there has been much development in the area of online literacy games, less is known about the attitudes and perceptions of teachers regarding the experience of teaching literacy through online remote synchronous applications, such as Zoom. The purpose of the current study was to examine the perceptions and attitudes towards remote teaching of literacy teachers of first and second grade.

Method:
We investigated the experience of remote teaching in the beginning of remote learning period, in May 2020. A remote literacy teaching questionnaire (RLTQ) was developed in order to asses teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards teaching literacy from distance. The RLTQ addressed the perceived benefits, strategies, challenges, and emotions related to teaching literacy acquisition in the first and second grade. 100 first and second grade teachers participated in the study, by answering online the RLTQ.

Results:
To analyze the dataset, we generated descriptive statistics for the quantitative items and engaged in a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of several open-ended questions. Thematic themes of benefits and challenges emerged across teachers. The most notable benefits that emerged were the flexibility in providing breaks according to the needs of the pupils (62%) the ability to control the classroom in terms of discipline and noises (54%). The most dominant challenges were the accessibility of all of the pupils to personal computers at their homes (63%), assessing the students' level of understanding (56%), providing differential instruction that is also adapted to the struggling students (46%) and the time required to prepare the lessons (53% spent more than two hours a day). Interestingly, most teachers did not use digital platforms such as learning websites, videos and games, and mainly displayed the printed traditional text books using Zoom meetings.

Conclusions:
To date, there are almost no studies on distant reading instruction. First and second grade teachers face many challenges and lack of knowledge about distance learning options. There are significant needs for teacher’s training on distance teaching options, development and organization of teaching materials in an accessible site, and promoting accessibility of personal computers to all students.

Keywords:

Covid-19, distant learning, reading acquisition, remote reading instruction.