ABSTRACT
In higher education, prior to Covid-19, the question of whether a course should be taught fully online was largely – excusing the pun – an academic question, as faculty usually had the freedom to decide which mode of delivery they preferred. The Covid-19 pandemic changed that luxury. Faculty around the world had to adapt their courses to an online format, often with little preparation time, limited professional development, and constrained resources. For bilingual and English language learners (ELLs), this created additional challenges for both students and faculty, many of whom did not expect to have to teach and learn online. Despite the challenges, the transition also offered an opportunity to both students and faculty to experience a mode that they would not otherwise have chosen, and to re-evaluate what worked, what didn’t work, and why. This chapter presents a case study of ELLs learning English in Taiwan, who had to transition from learning in-person to online. The courses were in English reading, English conversation, and journalistic English, all of which were traditionally taught in lecture format but had to be converted to asynchronous, synchronous, or some blend of both. For asynchronous instruction, PowerCam and EverCam were used to create video lectures. For synchronous instruction, Facebook’s video streaming feature was used to deliver live lectures. The study shares insights of both the faculty and students and offers evidence-based research drawn from multimedia theory that shows how multimedia theory can be beneficial for bilingual and ELLs, in both online and traditional modes of delivery.
