COVID-19 and the pre-existing language teacher supply crisis

Abstract

The insufficient supply of K-12 language – world language (WL) and English as a second language (ESL) – teachers in the United States has been a pervasive challenge for school administrators seeking to provide language learning opportunities for their students. The issue is complex – including numerous factors that adversely affect the recruitment of future educators as well as their retention once in the classroom. Almost all states report a dearth of WL and/or ESL teachers, and WL is the discipline with the highest predictive teacher turnover rate – whether by leaving the profession entirely ( leavers) or opting to move to a different school ( movers). In spring 2020, the global health pandemic placed additional demands on all educators, and consequently some reports predict an exodus of teachers from K-12 schools. This article presents the results of a study exploring language teachers’ intention to leave the profession as a consequence of school-related responsibilities and experiences during spring 2020. Data revealed three profiles of K-12 language teachers: stayers, leavers, and conditional stayers. Implications related to influential factors in teachers’ potential decisions to remain in or exit the profession are provided.

Teaching and learning languages online: Challenges and responses

“…Given the fact that online teaching creates an additional workload for language teachers, a few studies have examined language teacher retention, exploring why language teachers have left or stayed in the profession after experiencing the emergence of online teaching during the pandemic. For example, Moser & Wei, (in press) profile three types of teachers – stayers, leavers, and conditional stayers – characterizing each group in terms of their differing levels of human, social, structural, and psychological capital. Language teachers “felt untrained, marginalized, and emotionally overworked” (p. 26) in their online teaching during the pandemic; thus, it is necessary to include online teaching pedagogy in language teacher education and build professional networks to support language teachers’ ongoing professional development.…”

What’s Next? Challenges of Teaching English in the Post-Covid-19 Pandemic in Kuwait

“…With the migration to online teaching, scholars in the field conducted studies from different perspectives of online teaching. For instance, the retention of language teachers using technology (Moser and Wei, 2022), lack of technological skills (Tarrayo, Paz, & Gepila, 2022), anxiety and stress in online teaching (Gregersen, Mercer, & MacIntyre, 2021), the necessity to include technology in conventional pedagogy (Sayer and Braun, 2020), the piloting of new online platforms such as Classmoto (Bonner, Garvey, Miner, Godin, & Reinders, 2022). Other studies investigated students' perspectives on online learning.…”

Iraqi Kurdish EFL teachers’ beliefs about technological pedagogical and content knowledge: The role of teacher experience and education

“…This is because integrating technology with learning could pave the way for providing learners with more effective learning ( Ponce Gea et al, 2021 ); more recently, employing technology has become an important goal of educational organizations in order to ensure quality education during the pandemic ( Tria, 2020 ; Adipat, 2021 ). Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an abrupt shift towards distance-learning; however, teachers find technology-dependent teaching a daunting task due to their lack of experience in teaching remote classes ( Moser et al, 2021 ; Moser and Wei, 2021 ). This dramatic shift poses an increasing demand for rethinking the contribution of technology to teaching, which specifically requires developing a stronger grasp of subject matter knowledge ( Cahapay, 2020 ; Adipat, 2021 ).…”

“…This paradigm shift in learning and the ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have led to a dramatic rise in the demand for rethinking traditional pedagogical practices to provide responsive, relevant, and effective learning ( Cahapay, 2020 ; Adipat, 2021 ). In response to this need, researchers have been prominently concerned with how language teachers deliver language learning materials in technology-enhanced classrooms following the principles of effective pedagogy ( Tseng et al, 2020 ; Moser and Wei, 2021 ). In such a context, teachers’ pedagogical beliefs about integrating technology as an emerging theme in explicating teachers’ pedagogical reasoning and employing digital technology have been of primary importance ( Jimoyiannis and Komis, 2007 ; Tseng et al, 2020 ).…”