Emergency remote education in foreign and second language teaching

This study aims at tracing the effects of emergency remote education due to Covid-19 on foreign/second language teaching documented in research papers and reports. Employing document analysis, it identifies the research contexts and key findings reported in the studies published between 1 January and 28 October 2020. The findings indicate that a significant number of publications consist of reports presented by practitioners, i.e. schools, governmental authorities and educational foundations, and that the tertiary level is the most frequently covered context in the papers. The analysed publications report slightly more Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)-driven affordances for teachers than constraints and suggest that both teachers and students are able to turn challenges of ERT into affordances when they receive sufficient support from governmental authorities, schools or peers and benefit from already acquired digital skills and technical infrastructure available. The findings also indicate a gap of research based on classroom data, which would more effectively contribute to an understanding of the challenges and affordances of ERT in language teaching.