Innovation in Language Learning

Online Teaching has been a topic of major interest widely spoken, written and discussed about in the past couple of years, especially recently when the world was hit by the Coronavirus pandemic.  In an era focused primarily on technology as made clear also by Selwyn, multimodality & multimedia: synchronous, asynchronous, blended, the Maltese education system had no other choice than to swiftly adapt, distancing itself from the traditional classroom with face-to-face instruction in favour of distance online learning, leaving educators on their own to experiment, practise and evaluate various teaching techniques and online platforms available for their perusal on the Web.  This paper looks at the perceptions and reactions of Italian LS teachers in secondary schools in Malta as they swiftly shifted their practice to online modes of teaching and learning during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. My study focused mainly on data collected through an online questionnaire which captured the views of almost 30% of Italian LS educators in Malta and Gozo, working with learners aged ten to sixteen years.  Using a series of open and closed-ended questions, compelling data was yielded on the techniques language teachers were adopting to deliver learning. Findings indicate teachers used a multimodal approach in most cases. Advantages and limitations of both systems emerged from their feedback.  Moreover, the study also sets light on the inadequate preparation in distance learning as perceived by educators while observing what activities, techniques and methodologies were put into practice.  The results show how much language teachers still feel unskilled technologically speaking yet how much aware and conscious they are about the benefits of a blended approach to language teaching and learning. 

References:

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