English as a Foreign Language in a New-Found Post-Pandemic World

Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed a new era in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning and teaching by shifting EFL education from the face-to-face learning paradigm to the online and distance learning paradigm. Teachers and students have faced several challenges such as choosing appropriate web tools for presenting content either synchronously or asynchronously, motivating students to participate, and assessing students’ learning. Additionally, this shift to emergency remote online learning represents a challenge for students, particularly with managing their own learning. Taking into account that many students attend low-income schools with limited resources that lack reliable access to the internet and computers, this shift has resulted in growing equity gaps. Likewise, transitioning to emergency remote teaching has revealed a lack of digital competency and readiness amongst teachers. English as a Foreign Language in a New-Found Post-Pandemic World presents an overview of various tools, designs, and strategies utilized to provide digital teaching and assessment of the English language, shares research on using digital technologies for supporting English language learning, and identifies promising areas and directions for future innovations, applications, and research in digital English language learning and teaching. Covering critical topics such as digital teacher education, language learning environments, and online instructional tools, this reference work is crucial for administrators, policymakers, teacher educators, special educators, educational technologists, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.