COVID-19 and Language Education: Lessons of a Pandemic for English Teaching

ABSTRACT

In this article, I present a thought experiment highlighting some lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic for language education. I focus on two characteristics of the pandemic and the English language teaching (ELT) industry. First, during the pandemic, humans appeared to grapple with the ancient problem of killer viruses, with modern medicine initially offering little beyond basic advice; and ELT seems to deal with old problems like teaching vocabulary with little real progress in decades. Second, Asia was the epicenter of COVID-19 that later spread worldwide and caused social consequences in addition to health disasters; and the history of English as an additional language started in Asia before spreading to other places and creating sociocultural challenges. Departing from this tentative analogy, I argue that traditional ELT theory and research trends need to be revisited, and sociopolitical concerns should be considered as crucial aspects of the essence of ELT.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 and education
• language education
• English language teaching
• ELT
• sociopolitics of English
• English teaching research

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Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong. His research areas include the sociopolitics of language education, qualitative research methodology, and critical studies of discourse in society. His writing has appeared in journals including Applied Linguistics; Language, Identity and Education; Critical Inquiry in Language Studies; and TESOL Quarterly. His most recent book is Doing Qualitative Research in Language Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).