Has Challenge Led to Innovation in Language Teaching Practices During ERT?

<p>School closures due to COVID-19 forced educational institutions to resort to technologies to ensure learning. This led to an unexpected digital transformation, calling into action the educational potential of technologies. Research shows that to benefit from the digital, we must embed it in innovative curriculum and methodology principles: meaningful learning, student-centered, more personalized, and flexible. To study how online teaching and learning was pedagogically and technologically accomplished in Portugal during emergency remote teaching (ERT), a survey was conducted with teachers nationwide. This article draws upon the part of the data regarding the language teachers who participated, and it aims to describe their language teaching practices and to identify emergent innovative pedagogical aspects. To accomplish it, quantitative descriptive analysis and content analysis were performed. Findings highlight that it is with younger students at lower education levels that learning tasks and interaction patterns tend to be more collaborative and diverse. Results also reveal a positive assessment of this teaching period, with several teachers describing it as an enriching challenge that, despite some drawbacks, led them to learn more and innovate their practices. Therefore, these online teaching experiences bring useful tips on how to stimulate innovative digital pedagogy in the language classroom.</p>