Virtual Teaching of English Language during Covid-19 Pandemic in Iran: Views and Attitudes

Information Technology in developing countries always is a new and critical topic, and looking at it as an alternative for traditional education, especially in English language learning and teaching, makes conservative educational systems and trainers to have a pessimistic view on it. (Younesi & Khan, 2020)In developing countries like Iran, IT has a special place in teaching the English language where not only it is a complement for traditional education but also it works independently as online English courses, online English institutes, and virtual Universities. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Iran took urgent measures to protect the health and safety of more than 15 million school students, 4 million university students, and 930,000 teachers (Iranpress, 2020). One of these measures was online education.The researcher in the present study investigated by a questionnaire with 25 questions to find the English learners and trainers’ point of view. The researcher got the 220 responses from academic English learners and trainers from twenty-three Universities all around Iran.In this study, the researcher found the importance of online English teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran as well as the English Learners and trainers views and attitudes on internet-based English learning and teaching programs.

Keywords:

English Language Teaching , Internet , COVID-19 , Iran