Understanding online CoPs during ERT: the experience of EAP tutors

de Lima Guedes, Karla (2024) Understanding online CoPs during ERT: the experience of EAP tutors. IATEFL International Conference & Exhibition 2024, The Brighton Centre, Brighton, United Kingdom. 15 - 19 Apr 2024.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Communities of Practice (CoPs) played a pivotal role during the challenging period of emergency remote teaching (ERT) brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. CoPs are groups of individuals who share a common concern, interest, expertise, or profession, and come together to collaborate, learn, and develop their knowledge and skills in a particular domain. They can play a crucial role in providing teaching support in education. During ERT, these communities facilitated the rapid adaptation to remote learning environments and served as platforms for the exchange of best practices, innovative teaching strategies, and technological insights. They enabled second language educators to support each other and collaboratively develop new pedagogical strategies and approaches tailored to the unique demands of online language teaching in their respective contexts. To better understand the role CoPs played during ERT, this study examined the different types of support practitioners in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional programme were seeking or offering, which led them to create or join various online CoPs throughout the pandemic. This presentation will delve into how EAP practitioners defined and perceived online CoPs, the types of CoPs in which they participated, and discuss the importance of fostering these communities as well as the challenges that can arise when building them remotely. Despite living in post-pandemic times, fostering these online communities are crucial for language teachers’ practice, especially for those teaching remotely.

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