Analysis of the perceptions of efl teachers towards the transition to emergency remote teaching due to a pandemic: a case study in a private university in Cartagena, Colombia

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has marked recent human history due to the effects of isolation, which led to significant changes in diverse areas of life, including work and education, which had to move from face-to-face to remote modalities. This research intends to study the perceptions of a group of English teachers from a higher education institution in the Colombian Caribbean region about the change from face-to-face to emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the pandemic, in terms of three aspects: the challenges faced after the change, the strategies implemented to face these challenges, and finally, the lessons learned from the experience of this transition in the global educational environment. This research, which employs the case study method, follows the interpretive paradigm and mixed methods approach, and the data for this study was obtained through the application of an online questionnaire with three questions related to the three aforementioned aspects. The results were organized into three categories: home as a workplace, teacher's pedagogy, and human approach. This research attempts to provide information that helps to study more rigorously and deeply various strategies for teachers’ work, especially those of English and foreign languages, in future emergency scenarios in which it is necessary to shift modalities.