Designing materials for emergency remote language teaching contexts: A qualitative study of pre-service teachers' experiences

Abstract

Emergency Remote Language Teaching is a new term coined after the concept of Emergency Remote Teaching (Hodges, et al., 2020), which emphasizes that teaching that is being done during emergencies and crises, as the pandemic caused by COVID-19, is neither distance nor online teaching properly. This paper explores the attitudes and perceptions of pre-service bilingual primary teachers at the University of Córdoba (Spain) regarding the design of socially and culturally responsive learning materials in a real Emergency Remote Language Teaching context. Due to the nature of this exploratory research, this study was designed to perform a qualitative analysis. To analyze the data, the grounded-theory scheme was followed to establish different categories and topics, then content analysis was applied, and finally, a manual SWOT analysis was created. Participants showed positive attitudes towards the design of materials for Emergency Remote Language Teaching, emphasizing the feeling of real teachers, the design of resources with a meaningful purpose, and the importance of ‘thinking outside the box.’ They also found challenges derived from the new, complex situation, and the lack of experience designing materials for distance teaching. Recommendations are proposed for teacher training and materials design in Emergency Remote Language Teaching contexts.