THE PERSPECTIVES OF SECONDARY SCHOOL EFL TEACHERS ON ONLINE TEACHING IN THE SHADOW OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The COVID-19 period has undoubtedly been recorded in history as a painful process for education. Almost all the countries of the world adopted the forced lock-down as a remedy to curb the spread of the virus. Turkey was not exempt from this situation. As a result of this, during the COVID-19 pandemic period, education at all levels was given online remotely. Hodges et al. (2020) coined the term "emergency distance teaching" (ERT) to describe this unexpected new situation. ERT is viewed as a short-term solution to ensure the continuation of education rather than a comprehensive educational reform. Teachers, without a doubt, had significant responsibilities in the implementation of the distance online education mode during the COVID-19 era, and they did their best to meet these responsibilities. As a natural result of this situation, teachers gained extremely valuable knowledge and skills related to online education and had solid perspectives on the subject. In parallel, the primary goal of this research is to reveal the perspectives of EFL teachers in Turkey on online education and to benefit from these perspectives in the future development of this educational mode. A mixed-methods design was used to achieve this goal. The screening method was used for the quantitative part of the research, and a semi-structured interview method was used for the qualitative part of the research. The study included 120 EFL permanent teachers working in public and private schools in Siirt during the 2021–2022 academic year. A scale on EFL teachers' perspectives related to online teaching, originally developed by Reza Dashtestani (2014), was used to determine the perspectives of EFL teachers on online education. The questionnaire consists of 34 items in total, and was 5- point Likert scale questionnaire. The questionnaire has three sub-dimensions. These dimensions are focused on the following points, respectively: 1) The attitudes of EFL vii teachers regarding the use of online education. 2) The challenges and limitations faced by EFL teachers during the online education process. 3) The perspectives of teachers about the implementation of strategies to be applied in online language teaching. The result of the research showed that EFL teachers agree that online learning is beneficial and has become an important component of today's educational system. They do, however, acknowledge that the implementation stage of online education is not without its challenges. Among these challenges are a lack of technological infrastructure, issues with internet connectivity, and students' lack of proficiency with online education applications. In order to overcome these challenges, education authorities and policymakers should work together to make the online education process healthie