By distance learning we understand an educational situation in which a teacher and his/her students are not placed in one physical environment. Distance learning was first applied in the 19th century and has undergone a long way of technological improvement. It has become indispensable in the time of global pandemic. It is characterized by both advantages and challenges, and, correspondingly, in normal situations is used by adults for additional education or at any level /age in combination with traditional face-to-face education. The goal of this paper is to assess how ready we turned out to be to involuntary, caused by extreme situation of coronavirus, switching over to distance learning. The article presents results obtained from six countries – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Nigeria, UK, and Ukraine - as well as some views of educators from several other countries. Although the samples were not representative by number of the research populations, they tried to take into consideration the strata involved (school/university teachers, younger than 30, 31-50, older than 50), in order to be trustworthy. The conclusion made is that the trend is that we (at least, in many countries, or many of us) are still rather far from ready to carry out so often declared and advertised distance learning with optimal efficiency and much work is needed to be able to switch to high-quality distance education.

The purpose of this study is to find out the effectiveness of integrating into teaching English writing movies whichare supported by online technologies. Using movies in English classes has become the interest of many teachersand educators, as films are believed to be very effective, appealing and motivating authentic materials. Filmicapproach somehow creates a natural English language teaching (ELT) environment in the classroom and makesthe instruction of English enjoyable, particularly in terms of learners. Mixing motion pictures and onlinetechnologies both of which have a very crucial role in students’ life, would be fun and innovative. This studyfocused on teaching writing through the use of films and contemporary educational technologies amongundergraduate learners. The action research was designed at Qafqaz University in Azerbaijan among 32intermediate level students in the School of Languages. The learners were divided into experiment and controlgroups which were almost at the same English proficiency levels. The research involved a questionnaireconsisting of 10 questions with participation of 32 learners. The study is expected to be helpful for Englishteachers in terms of employing movies and online technologies effectively in writing classes, not to mention it islikely be a helpful material for further researchers in this field.

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