Teaching grammar and vocabulary in COVID-19 times: Approaches used in online teaching in Polish schools during a pandemic

Abstract

Technology has been called to the rescue on a number of occasions, be it in large classes, under-resourced contexts, after earthquakes or other natural disasters. The COVD-19 pandemic which struck the whole world in pring 2020 afterwards necessitated a sudden shift from face-to-face to distance teaching. With no preparation, no training and very little support from the state, language teachers had to find their own ways transferring language instruction to the online medium. This paper explores the modes, approaches, affordances and obstacles of COVD-era grammar and vocabulary teaching in Poland. Apart from examining the shape of online teaching from two perspectives (student teachers and school teachers), the study confronts the approaches used in Polish schools against well-established models: stages of CALL (Warschauer & Healey, 1998, Bax, 2003), AMR (Puentedura, 2006) and kills pyramid (Hampel & tickler, 2005).