Introduction to The world universities’ response to COVID-19: remote online language teaching

Abstract

March 2020 saw the advent of a pandemic that is having a profound impact on all facets of our lives with special reference, in our case, to language education. Universities worldwide found themselves in an emergency predicament and we had to suddenly abandon traditional forms of classroom and/or blended learning and move to a completely remote online delivery of courses. The imperative to continue teaching in these new circumstances did not come, as very often is the case, from the relevant institutional administrations in a top-down manner, but from our own, inner pedagogical and human instincts. The usual lines of communication with our students and colleagues were cut off and we had to find and resort to new ways of communicating and teaching. We had no precedents to refer to and found ourselves in the situation to search for innovative solutions using the already existing technology, skills, resources, and methodological approaches. This situation was challenging in the extreme. Searching for solutions and support, our language learning community developed, in many ways, new lines of communication. It was then, in June 2020 that we had the idea of writing a case study each to be published together in one volume, to make some of the informal conversations that had happened during the lockdown formally available to the whole community. We come from different countries, different institutions with distinct academic, linguistic, cultural, and professional backgrounds and yet we all found ourselves in the position to have to solve a major puzzle – a pandemic-caused lockdown that fragmented our established practices.