Emergency remote teaching of foreign languages at Saudi universities: Teachers’ reported challenges, coping strategies and training needs

Though considerable research has been reported on COVID-19-related distance education, some dimensions of remote foreign language teaching experiences during the pandemic crisis remain to be explored. The study reported in this paper investigated Saudi university foreign language teachers' accumulated experiences and reflective beliefs of emergency remote instruction. The study focused specifically on: a) the general educational challenges the teachers encountered and their attempts to overcome them; b) the teachers' perceived difficulties in remotely teaching and assessing foreign language areas and their strategies for coping with them; and c) their reflective evaluation of remote foreign language teaching after doing it for three academic terms. Questionnaire data was collected from 112 teachers of Arabic and English as foreign languages, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 teachers. The analysis of both data types showed that the participants had a number of general educational and language-teaching-specific challenges in their COVID-19-related remote teaching. The teachers generally viewed the remote assessment of language areas is a more challenging task than teaching them. Reading was rated as the least difficult language area to teach and assess remotely, whereas writing was the most difficult one. The teachers reported using various coping strategies to overcome the educational and language teaching-specific challenges. They perceived their remote teaching experiences positively, but reported their needs for further training in developing better online assessment methods, using different teaching platforms and technological tools, and managing classroom interactions. The paper ends by discussing the results of the study and their implications.