Teaching English for Elementary Students During and Post-pandemic: Teachers' Perspectives
Abstract
technology becomes increasingly common to be used in teaching and learning realm, and as the shift of learning modes before-during-and-post-pandemic is getting surprisingly transformed, the integration of technology in education offers more flexible learning opportunities. Digital media creation is one of the opportunities offered to be implemented in classes (either face-to-face or face-to-screen) and has been developed from time to time even before the pandemic hit not only Indonesia but also the globe. Especially for young learners, the teaching and learning activities should be made new, fun, and interactive. Hence, digital media presents to fulfill young learners’ needs as well as attract their attention. However, not all EYL teachers were ready to immediately build an easy-accessed digital classroom. Some still had questions about the importance, regarding the fast-changing situation. This study aims to explore the integration of digital media in English class from EYL teachers’ viewpoints. The instrument used in this survey research was a questionnaire distributed randomly to 19 English teachers of elementary schools in Malang. Findings revealed that the respondents admitted that there were benefits or prospects of digital media—one of which was enhancing the classroom technology. Nonetheless, the challenges were still dominating and—to some extent, need to be investigated further. Teachers preferred to blend synchronous and asynchronous teaching (47.4%) besides they thought that it could facilitate students’ needs (89.5), this method was also considered as attractive for young learners (10.5%). Somehow, most teachers still put face-to-face method in their favor (84.2%) to be implemented in future.
Keywords: teachers’ perspectives, EYL teachers, English for young learners, digital media creation
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