A Silver Lining: Metaphors Suggesting Professional Development through Emergency Online Language Teaching in Primary Education

The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate the way Hungarian primary language teachers coped with emergency remote teaching (ERT) introduced during the Covid-19 epidemic and the effects this mode of teaching exerted on their subsequent face-to-face teaching practice. While there are scores of studies written on the subject, hardly any have focussed on primary language education; hence our choice of the primary school sample. Out of a multi-item online questionnaire forwarded to all the primary schools in Hungary, we decided to focus on the last two items only, namely those which requested the 706 volunteering respondents to suggest two metaphors with concomitant brief explanations: one to describe their experiences of online teaching in 2020, and another one to specify the changes they perceived in their professional attitudes and competences by the time of administering the survey in 2022. The results demonstrate a decisively positive shift as the respondents realised that the digital expertise that they had gained during ERT would help them teach more effectively in the “real” classroom. The study also raises the issue of what educational authorities and teacher educators should do to promote digital education in pre- and in-service training.