Pedagogical Requirements for ESL Instructors in Online Language Teaching: Practices and Perceptions from a Sri Lankan University

Abstract

This paper covers pedagogical requirements of the online teaching. Despite its importance, the focus on pedagogical requirements of online language teachers has been a neglected area in online teaching. Even though there has been a sudden pressure from the education administrators on shifting to online teaching, the passage provided for the teachers for shifting is minimal, especially in countries like Sri Lanka where the use of technology for language learning is not a usual practice. The change to online teaching was imposed only after the sudden halt of onsite education which was hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom became the household word overnight, especially among the universities and private fee levying schools in Sri Lanka. Within a year of the introduction of Zoom, it spread to schools to conduct classes for school children as there was no improvement in the pandemic situation. In this case, teachers were struggling to adapt to the new technology too. This paper presents the feedback obtained from the ESL instructors at the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka pertaining to the challenges they faced and the strategies they adopted to keep the online teaching rolling. In the study, it was revealed that most of the instructors had issues in handling the online classes and they declared that they did not have any kind of training for online teaching. Thus, the educational authorities should think of training ESL instructors for the reason that teaching the language online is a challenge.