The current paper discussed the challenges encountered by university teachers during online education in Morocco. It also investigated teachers' attitudes towards their distance teaching experience. 156 Chouaib Doukkali University teachers, (male=85 and female=71) were administered an online questionnaire via their professional email addresses. The participants, belonging to five faculties, were kindly invited to fill out the question within two weeks. For triangulation purposes, 20 (male=12 and females=8) informants were interviewed about their experience with distance education. Quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive statistics to extract demographic characteristics of the participants and provide measurements of mean values, standard deviations, and frequencies of the variables. Qualitative data were thematically analyzed. Findings showed that although the vast majority of the respondents used online teaching, many faced both technical and logistical barriers, which were reported to impede the good delivery of lessons. Also, the majority of the participants showed a negative attitude towards the COVID-19 online teaching experience. The study discusses some implications for online teaching practice in tertiary education in Morocco.

This paper investigates ways in which textbook evaluation can help in implementing a positive change in EFL teachers’ professional careers. It draws the attention of Moroccan high school English language practitioners to the viability of using textbook evaluation as a reflective practice to enhance teachers’ professional development. It argues that a systematic textbook evaluation allows teachers to develop professionally while reflecting on the content of the textbooks they are using. This process can be formative within the formal guided context of in-service teacher training programs where voluntary teachers regularly meet in teacher learning communities (TLCs)devoted to textbook evaluation. The objective of such collective reflective activity is to encourage teachers’ lifelong learning as they will learn from each other’s experiences and improve their teaching practices. Eventually, they will agree on effective reflective practices which promote teachers’ professional development. The findings recorded by TLCs could be used in improving the quality of future textbooks. A survey was designed to explore the attitudes of Moroccan high school English language teachers towards the suggested model of textbook evaluation and its ability to promote teachers’ professional development. The findings demonstrated that the teachers are in favor of the suggested textbook evaluation model as they believe that it has the potential of gearing not only their professional development, but also the quality of current and future ELT textbooks.

The world has witnessed major changes in delivery modes in education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Being no exception, Morocco declared a full lockdown in March 2020, and this resulted in the use of online platforms to cope with the new situation. The platform that was adopted by the Moroccan Ministry of Education was Microsoft Teams (MT). Hence, the current paper investigated Moroccan high school EFL teachers’ use of the platform accounting for their age, gender, anxiety, and attitudes towards the platform. For this aim, a questionnaire adapted from Computer Anxiety Rating Scale (CARS) by Heinssen et al. (1987) was distributed to 171 EFL teachers working in different public high schools belonging to the academy of Casablanca/Settat. Results revealed that the participants’ attitudes towards the usability of the platform were negatively associated with their years of experience, and their general anxiety and power and control of the platform negatively affected the time they spent on the platform. The findings imply that anxiety should be taken into consideration as an integral component in further implementation of technology in education.

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Metacognitive strategy awarenessMetacognition refers to an individual's awareness of their cognitive development, mental processes, learning styles, and the capacity to organize, manage and solve problems. Flavell (1979) regards reading as a cognitive enterprise that involves an awareness of a variety of MCRS and skills. Brown et al. (1986) maintain that metacognition is crucial to reading comprehension. In the same vein, Karbala (2011) argues that the context of reading comprises two types of cognition: A reader's knowledge of reading strategies to learn from the text, and the ability an individual has to monitor their actions during the reading process reading. MCRS are described as tools that assist students to understand their abilities and figure out how to learn different skills in the learning environment while dealing with a reading task (Sutiyatno & Sukarno, 2019). MCRS are regarded as conscious, deliberate, and goal-oriented activities or plans that readers employ to decode, understand and construct meanings from written texts (Afflerbach et al., 2008;Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012). While reading skills are defined as unconscious, automatic, effortless activities (Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012) used to decode and comprehend texts quickly, efficiently, and fluently, "usually without the reader's awareness of the components or controls involved" (Afflerbach et al., 2008, p.15), MCRS are "in fact problem-solving strategies employed by readers to cope with reading texts" (Al-Mekhlafi, 2018, p. 299).According to Abu-Rabia (2018), metacognitive reading processes include three key stages: planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Each reading phase comprises a number of MCRS that could be employed at a specific point during the global reading comprehension process. These strategies comprise setting an objective to reading, activating background knowledge, making predictions, skimming, scanning, repairing, guessing meaning, visualizing, checking, revising, altering reading speed, deconstructing the structure of the text, summarizing, evaluating, and self-questioning in the postreading phase to check whether the purpose behind reading is achieved (Carrell et al., 1998). Iwai (2011) maintains that metacognition plays a key role in reading comprehension as it is linked to linguistic, cognitive, and social skills development, and that metacognitive strategy awareness can sharpen students' mental processes and make them strategic thinkers who can deal with difficult tasks in a scientific way. Similarly, Auerbach & Paxton (1997) assert that metacognitive strategies can be effectively activated only when learners read a certain text with a particular purpose in mind. According to Karbalaei (2011, p.7), to do a reading comprehension task successfully, readers must use their metacognitive knowledge to trigger "conscious and deliberate strategies." MCRS show readers how to deal with a given reading task, what textual prompts to exploit, how to decode the reading material, and what procedures to follow when failing to get the...