Online learning impact on transitioning to ERT: Mexican ELT experiences

Abstract

This project set out to scrutinise the experiences of a group of students pursuing an online B.A. in English Language Teaching (ELT) at four different public universities in Mexico while being in-service English teachers at different levels in public and private sectors. Their teaching practice was given in face-to-face settings; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these teacher-students were required to migrate their practice to remote teaching. It is in this line of arguments that the researchers, as the participants’ ELT teachers, were interested in knowing if any strategies from the online-learning student role were useful to transition as remote ELT-teachers. As a follow-up method to questionnaires administered to 55 online ELT students, semi-structured interviews were conducted to a total of 11 participants, from the participating universities. Findings indicate that online learning experience does have a positive impact when transitioning from face-to-face instruction to remote teaching. Regardless of the participants’ ICT skills development, there was evidence of soft skills fostering. Moreover, the challenges and limitations they faced inevitably led to a fruitful reengineering process.

Keywords

• online learning
• ert
• in-service teachers
• covid-19
• transition