CLT in pandemic remote teaching – how communicative are group tasks in synchronous online environments?

Abstract

Once COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in spring 2020 and continued for two more years, it exerted an enormous (negative and tragic, unfortunately) impact on the way people lived, worked and studied. New ways of coping with apparently well-established and familiar tasks had to be invented, often at quite a cost of time, money and effort. One could even say that in many domains the pandemic moved back the development of humankind a number of years backward. The purpose of the paper will be to highlight the way Communicative Language Teaching was implemented in the reality of online teaching in the first (March-June 2020) and second wave (November 2020-June 2021) the pandemic in Poland. The paper reports upon a study in which primary and secondary school teachers’ perceptions towards teaching communication in the online medium, lesson models used as well as opportunities and limitations of different online platforms in terms of their suitability for organising communicative tasks were gained insight into through observation, lesson plan analysis and interview.