White (2017) is of the opinion that not only teachers, but also learners had better
reconsider their practices since online education has given a rise to a drastic change in pedagogy and adds that while technological developments are widely focused, advancements in education is highly ignored. In parallel with this, as Hodges et al. (2020) states, a lot of instructors and teacher educators were completely unprepared for the situationin the emergency online
education process which demonstrates the necessity for more research in this field. Congruently, Walters, Grover, Turner and Alexander (2017) put forward that in the process of planning professional development programs aiming people who are going to teach online, the necessary contents should be clarified to support instructors and to meet student expectations. To this end, the instructors were asked about what content they would include in trainings of both pre-service and in-service EFL teachers on online education if they were the authorities.
The third research question was “What are the perspectives of the EFL instructors in an English preparatory school on in-service teacher training in distance education?”.
All the instructors were firstly asked what could be the necessary contents for in-service trainings of instructors having various backgrounds, experiences and technology skills during the semi-structured instructor interviews and as it is clear in Table 18, all the content suggestions were given along with the excerpts. The contents include usage of technology and tools, student participation, student motivation, online material development and adaptation, time management in online lessons, variety in online education, online teaching methodologies, teaching four skills online, ways to increase discipline, ways to enhance reliability, learning about student profile, ways to create awareness in students, problem solving for online lessons and institutions’
expectations. Later, with the selected 3 instructors, focus group interview was conducted and these items were prioritized which can be seen in detail in Table 19. As mentioned earlier, the instructors were chosen among the ones who showed less similarities and therefore, after the rating process, the instructors were not asked to reach a consensus for each item in order to provide a discussion environment. Among these 14 items, student motivation, online material development and adaptation and problem solving for online lessons were rated in the first 7 by each instructor. It is also striking that the least priorities were given to time management in online lessons and institutions’ expectations items which were rated after 12 by all the focus
group instructors. Even though other items were ordered differently by the instructors, it was reported that none of them was unnecessary, however, priorities were different by the instructors and it was hard for them to prioritize one over another.
Finally, the fourth research question was “What are the perspectives of the EFL instructors in an English preparatory school on pre-service teacher training in distance education?”.
Similar to the steps to answer research question 3, all the instructors were firstly asked to come up with some content ideas for pre-service EFL teacher education and later order them in the focus group meeting. What is different here is that one of the instructors did not think that it was necessary to have separate lessons for online lessons in the curriculum of ELT students by stating it was all about experience. Therefore, the items derived from 9 instructors’ views on this issue. The proposed items are usage of technology and tools, student participation, student motivation, online material development and adaptation, teaching four skills online, online assessment, psychology for online lessons, problem solving for online lessons, how to teach students to be an online citizen, online environment, variety in online education, time management in online lessons and rationale behind educational technologies which can be examined in detail in Tables 20 and 21.
When the proposed contents of in-service and pre-service training are compared, some overlapping as well as distinct items can be observed. Different items are online assessment, psychology for online lessons, how to teach students to be an online citizen, online environment and rationale behind educational technologies. It can be claimed that there are different
theoretical lessons for pre-service teachers by looking at the distinct items herein. For the items student participation and student motivation, instructors gave less priority to pre-service training than the in-service contents. Usage of technology and tools and online material development and adaptation items are in top 7 for every focus group instructor. Time management in online lessons item is the least prioritized item for two instructors. For most of the items, there are huge gaps between instructor decisions and the reasons for it include having other items to prioritize, finding similarities between face-to-face and online lessons, not having enough progress in items like online assessment, and not seeing some of them as a responsibility of language teachers as in teaching how to be an online citizen item. Apart from these items, the instructors were asked if
they had something to add this list and they put forward that some of the items in in-service training can be included in pre-service training and likewise, some of the items here can be considered for in-service training. For example, one of the instructors stated that even teachers do not know how to be online citizens.
All of these findings are of vital importance on the ground that they serve as a
comprehensive needs analysis for this field. Online education is a great part of our lives from now on and even if there may not be a lockdown all the time, most of its features will be used on a large scale. Furthermore, the shift to online education has also brought about opportunities not only for pedagogical examination as well as for reconstruction in terms of curriculum which will still be of value even after the pandemic (Cunningham, 2021; Guillén, Sawin & Avineri, 2020).
As aforementioned, even though these content ideas are only based on the experiences of instructors in only one institution, the instructors made their comments by bearing in mind that there are different types of instructors as well as teachers-to-be having different experiences, opportunities, skills and traits. In addition, a vast number of research studies conducted on higher education after COVID-19 process which were exemplified and discussed before (e.g. Castelli &
Sarvary, 2021; Gao & Zhang, 2020; Gonzalez et al., 2020; Hapsari, 2021, Muthuprasad et al., 2021; Öztürk Karataş & Tuncer, 2020; Taşçı, 2021) prove that similar situations were
experienced not only in Turkey, but also all around the world. Correspondingly, most of these items might be applicable for all language instructors and language teacher training programs as well as teachers and teacher training programs of other fields.
CHAPTER 6