Teaching ESP during emergency remote learning (ERL): Best practices

Abstract

After a year more of living with COVID-19, the teachers’ and students’ resilience is still demanding, particularly regarding language online learning. Both parties must keep struggling to fulfill the learning requirements in times of crisis. One of the challenges in language issues is teaching English for Specific Purpose (ESP) in higher education during emergency remote learning (ERL) including teaching ESP at Poltekkes Kemenkes Malang in 2020-2021. At these times, ESP teachers have to design the materials by taking a lot of consideration regarding the students’ needs, goals, learning model, activities, tools, and feedback that met the emergency due to Coronavirus outbreak. They planned, implemented, and evaluated the learning process until they can find the best ones for the students. This study was a survey research with 23 participants of ESP lecturers. This article presented some best practices of teaching ESP in the online mode during ERL as the best experience of ESP lecturers, in the hope that it will be able to give some new insights for fellow educators to help them to provide better learning experiences for the students.

EFL Teachers’ Perceived Efficacy of Digital Platforms in Varied Online English Classes in a Higher Education

“…The third most frequently used digital platform in this study is YouTube as a videobased platform which is extremely beneficial when the teachers explained critical concepts both synchronously and asynchronously. This finding is similar to the studies conducted by some researchers (Iswati, 2021;Mandasari & Wulandari, 2021;Suadi, 2021;Sunardi, 2021). These studies argue that YouTube can provide students and teachers with numerous authentic samples of ordinary English used by native English speakers in their daily lives that can be found in certain channels which contain videos dedicated to a specific topic or English content area.…”

“…These include the college's e-learning platform (Moodle), WhatsApp group, YouTube, Google Form, Google Meet, Zoom meeting, Google Drive, Socrative, and Quizziz. These findings corroborate previous research indicating that a combination of multiple online learning digital platforms must be used to achieve valuable online teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic in higher education (Abubakar & Tsuraya, 2021;Iswati, 2021;Mandasari & Wulandari, 2021;Suadi, 2021;Sunardi, 2021).…”

“…Similarly, ESP lecturers combine three media of learning platform as the best experience to provide better learning experiences for students. They are Edlink for presenting instructions and delivering assignments, Zoom Cloud Meeting for teacher explanations and practicing specific language skills, and Telegram or social media for interactive communication in the distance learning mode by delivering quizzes/polls (Mandasari & Wulandari, 2021). Abubakar and Tsuraya (2021) argue that because many things are missing during online learning, no single perfect digital platform can replace face-to-face learning.…”

“…Thus, in order to keep it running smoothly, a combination of platforms must be used. To bolster this assertion, Mandasari and Wulandari (2021) state that utilizing multiple platforms aided students in avoiding task overload and boredom, as well as in creating an attractive learning environment. Additionally, combining two or three platforms into a series of online meetings increased students' motivation.…”

“Unmute, please!’’: Tertiary Lecturers’ Perceptions on Emergency Remote English Language Teaching During COVID-19 Pandemics

“…Teaching English in the pandemic context within ERT has been denoted as emergency remote English language teaching (ERELT) (Hazaea et al, OPEN ACCESS 2021), and based on the scientific and critical attention it receives in both practical and theoretical research, it will surely become a growing academic field of its own. A plethora of studies have been conducted that investigate various aspects of ERELT-ranging from studies on theoretical framework or emerging challenges (Bolkurt & Sharma, 2020;Hazaea et al, 2021;Mohmmed et al, 2020), to studies reporting on students' attitudes (AlAdwani & AlFadley, 2022;Bondarenko, 2021;Huang et al, 2020;Juárez-Díaz & Perales, 2021;Maican & Cocoradă, 2021;Peňalver & Laborda, 2021), teachers' perceptions (Alves et al, 2020;Erarslan, 2021;Hazaea et al, 2021;Juárez-Díaz & Perales, 2021;Kohnke & Jarvis, 2021;Mousavi et al, 2021;Narqvi & Zehra 2020;Nugroho et al, 2021;Sepulveda-Escobar & Morrison, 2020;Sundarwati & Pahlevi, 2021;Wulandari 2021), assessment (Abduh, 2021), or best practices (Mandasari & Wulandari, 2021). Interestingly, whatever the context in terms of how technically advanced the tertiary institutions are, the said studies all highlighted two key issues of ERELT being the most worrisome; poor technical resources of at least one party involved in the trilateral teaching chain (faculty facilities, teachers, students) on the one hand, and the inadequate digital literacy of teachers on the other.…”