Exploring teacher agency in online foreign language teaching (FLT) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—a systematic review

Wei Hu and Xianmin Shen ()
Additional contact information
Wei Hu: Beijing Language and Culture University
Xianmin Shen: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Palgrave Communications, 2024, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the global shift to online education at all levels, presenting dramatic changes and challenges. For foreign language teaching (FLT) in particular, the need to tackle difficulties and improve teaching requires a re-examination of teacher agency from an ecological perspective, especially the evolving and ever-changing roles undertaken by teachers at different stages of the teaching process. This study systematically reviews existing research on online FLT at the college level during the pandemic, aiming to develop a comprehensive model of teacher agency based on teachers’ roles and identities that proved effective during this period. After conducting a keyword search among Web of Science database in four categories (SSCI, SCI-Ex, A&HCI, and ESCI) and following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P 2020) and the clustering techniques of VOSviewer, we selected 39 peer-reviewed publications for this study. Our findings suggest that effective online FLT requires teachers to integrate multiple roles at different stages: before, during, and after online teaching. Specifically, six critical roles were identified, including technician, designer, motivator, communicator, assessor and facilitator, which as a whole contribute to the ecology of teacher agency. This review provides a model for understanding teacher agency during the pandemic, offering key insights for future research on online FLT.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-024-04244-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:11:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-024-04244-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-04244-2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().