Abstract:
Pre-recorded presentation link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PpVSAGANsY Since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, many schools around the world have been affected by the sudden, messy and chaotic transition from on-site, face-to-face teaching, to emergency online remote teaching. When students return to schools after weeks or months of a lockdown period, their overall academic performance varies. Based on my teaching observation with students from Foundation to Year 3 classes (around 650 students), some students present better engagement in learning while some struggled with their overall performances at school. In this presentation, I will explore how these concerns are vividly reflected in students overall learning performance of Chinese language learning in the language and culture program that I teach in a Victorian, suburban, multi-cultural and diverse primary school. The data of students’ participation rate collected over two extended lockdown periods in Melbourne in 2020 suggest that there was a cohort of students who excelled in their language learning due to increased level of parents’ engagement; learning a foreign language in the familiar home environment; and the specially-designed, diverse, engaging multi-modal learning tasks which combined audio, visual and kinesthetic ways of learning. At the same time, the data suggests that there were another group of students who could not engage in online learning due to various reasons. In this research, I use two groups of data collected in two lockdown terms in 2020 to explore the advantages and challenges that emerged during, and which shaped the emergency online remote teaching. Given the uncertainties and disruption that are still evident and possible in a COVID ‘normal’ environment, I will examine what can we do to better prepare our educators to embrace the advantages of utilising technology in teaching, while dealing with all the socioeconomic, emotional, physical and pedagogical challenges different learners face in the isolation of lockdown. Key words: emergency online remote teaching, participation rate, COVID-19 crisis, pedagogical opportunities and challenges