With the COVID-19 epidemic announced, in spring 2020, schools in Slovenia had to suddenly change their work method and provide all pupils with classes in form of online distance education, which brought about several problems and challenges. Nobody was prepared for such an event, neither education professionals nor politicians, so in the beginning a uniform plan on how to provide distance learning was lacking. Each school and each teacher tried to overcome this challenge by themselves and in their own way. Differences in the equipment available to teachers between schools started to show, along with differences in their abilities to use computers and their software skills required to continue their work. In the empirical part, we studied how teachers of the fourth and fifth grades of primary school conducted classes of English as a foreign language during the first wave of the epidemic. By carrying out semi-structured interviews, we obtained data on the experience of twelve teachers who taught English in the fourth and fifth grades in this period in twelve different schools across Slovenia. We asked them about the transition to distance teaching, the planning and implementation of foreign language classes in extraordinary circumstances and the challenges they had to face in this period. We determined that the change in the work method was stressful for everyone involved because of its sudden nature. A virtual working environment and access to it had to be introduced in a very short period of time. Teachers mostly lacked the time to prepare in advance for the new work method and were forced to teach following the system of trial and error. In order to find an appropriate teaching system suitable to them and their pupils as soon as possible, they attended education courses, asked each other for advice and shared guidelines, ideas and best practise examples. Our master’s thesis will contribute to the understanding of English-teaching during the COVID-19 epidemic and offer assistance for the re-implementation of a remote English-teaching system in case such a desire or need arise.
|