Abstract:

It is almost stating the obvious that the current pandemic has upset the entire paradigm of teaching and learning when traditional face-to-face education had to suddenly go online. What emerged has often little to do with principled and well-established distance/computer mediated/online teaching and learning and has duly been called emergency remote teaching (ERT). Far from being just a question of semantics, emergency remote teaching differs in many fundamental ways from established distance/online teaching. Because ERT happens without warning, few teachers had contingency plans on how to adapt and work through the syllabus in the new situation. The present paper reports on a case of emergency remote language teaching in higher education where, among the numerous challenges, assessing the students’ progress during the semester was one difficult syllabus requirement to tackle in the new online teaching. The study analyses the language learning syllabi in a technical university, comparing requirements set for ongoing formative assessment during the semester in the traditional face-to-face scenario with the solutions found by teachers during the online emergency teaching scenario. The findings indicate that, even if there were no contingency plans in place at the time of transitioning to online teaching, teachers drew heavily on their experience (with blended learning for instance) and replaced face-to-face in-class performance assessment with options such as learning portfolios for formative and summative assessment purposes. Acknowledging that these are different and not always equivalent learning activities, teachers nevertheless found numerous advantages to the solutions they applied, among which the fact that it gave every student in a large class the same amount of time and attention from the assessing teacher, a rarer occurrence in face-to-face scenarios.

Keywords:

Language learning and teaching, remote emergency teaching, online teaching, assessment, learning portfolios.