Thriving in the New Normal

Language education in higher education has been significantly impacted by COVID-19, and this has placed significant pressure on practitioners around the world irrespective of their respective experience prior to the pandemic. Teachers are now expected to deliver classes utilising new mediums whilst learning how to use different technologies. This can place a significant strain on individuals, institutions, and education sectors as everyone is expected to become proficient in a new normal working environment. In light of this, this chapter considers the in-service professional development needs and experiences of 88 language teachers at a Sino foreign university in Mainland China. The aim is that the insights provided here will help education providers better understand the challenges that their staff may be facing and consider ways in which teacher learning can be addressed. This chapter should be of interest to educators, managers, leaders, and policymakers in a wide range of international settings.

English Language Learning as Intercultural Experience

Teaching English in higher education entails additional factors and considerations that exemplify the complexity of accounting for the diverse population in modern higher education institutions. In particular, the increasing flow of international students and the employment demands of functioning in multicultural contexts render helping students to develop a critical understating of intercultural relations an important aspect of English language teaching. With the increasing adoption of English as a medium of instruction and its use as a lingua franca in intercultural communication, it is important to structure English education in a way that accounts for intercultural relations both in and outside the university. In addition to the postmodern conceptualizations of interculturality that emphasize the fluidity of culture, language and identity intercultural relations are characterized by power imbalances. That is why this chapter makes a case for the necessity of considering sociopolitical realities in intercultural English language teaching in higher education.

What Teachers Should and Shouldn't Do During Online Teaching

COVID-19 has influenced teaching all across the globe. The massive use of online learning has created a problem with teachers because of the differences between face-to-face teaching and online teaching. In this chapter, a discussion on how traditional face-to-face teaching differs from online teaching will be shown. How education in Hong Kong is affected by COVID-19 is also summarized. Additionally, the result of a case study in a linguistics course in a university in Hong Kong will be shown to demonstrate the attitudes of students regarding online learning. The mixed-method case study, which consists of survey data of 100 students and semi-structured interviews of eight students, showed that students hold a general mixed feeling towards online learning because of its drawbacks, such as lack of interactions despite the convenience that online learning provides. This chapter ends with a list of suggestions for online teachers.

Educational Symbiosis

This chapter considers how practitioners at a Sino-British institution have developed English language learning pathways and courses for students enrolled on industry-themed programmes to support a new syntegrative educational model. The chapter considers some of the challenges these educators have faced, not only because of the need to create offerings from the ground up, but also because of the difficulties COVID-19 and broader institutional provisional evolutions have presented. With this in mind, how the staff overcame the challenges they faced in responding to the foundation year developments, creating year two modules and business courses, whilst also providing ongoing continuing language and study skills support for students, along with administrative support, will be presented in the form of solutions and recommendations. It is hoped that others can learn from these experiences and reflections.

Improving Maritime English Oral Communication Skills in an Online Environment

Online education has been an option until the first half of the year 2020. After the outbreak of COVID-19, online learning has gradually become a must for education. In this period, institutions have had to transform and adopt not only their teaching approach and content, but also their technology. Maritime education and training inevitably has followed the same pattern. As English is the operational language of the sea, teaching maritime English has had its share from this transformation. This study focuses on improving maritime students' job-related communication skills in an online environment with online role-playing. The study firstly reviews general requirements and setbacks involved in online teaching and language requirements at sea. The focus of the study is on online oral communication role-playing to perform ship-based external communication. The study concludes by pinpointing minimum requirements for conducting such training, lessons learned from the sessions, as well as knowledge and experience achieved by the students.

Integrating Multicultural Education Into English Language Teaching

Multicultural education is an educational approach that focuses on accepting diversity in society, offers equal opportunities for students, and requires a transformation in the process of teaching. Foreign language teaching seems to be an appropriate field to utilize multiculturalism in the curriculum due to its relationship with culture and the flexibility of the content. Despite the existence of different approaches for the integration of multicultural content into the curriculum, there is little research explaining how to realize it in practice, especially in the field of foreign language teaching. Dealing with this problem, this chapter introduces the five dimensions of multicultural education and four levels of the content integration model, both designed by James A. Banks, to show how the English language curriculum could be restructured through the infusion of multicultural themes. This chapter appeals to the English teachers desiring to practice multicultural education in their teaching, and curriculum experts and decision-makers aiming to prepare a multicultural curriculum.

The Impacts of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) on Language Education

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) started to affect the education around the world in the winter of 2020, and each education level such as primary education, secondary education, and higher education had to adapt synchronous or asynchronous online learning emergently. This study will focus on particularly the rapid change in language teaching and learning. How the pandemic had an effect on language learners or teachers and language teaching methods or tools will be discussed in the light of the studies conducted from the beginning of the pandemic until now. Therefore, this study will be a theoretical study which summarizes the results of the studies, and the following questions will be examined in this review of literature: What is online learning? What are the differences between synchronous or asynchronous online learning? What kinds of digital applications, platforms, or teaching tools can be used in online learning?

Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining

This study aims to determine students' motivation towards Mandarin learning during COVID-19. Theoretically, motivation is considered a broad concept that aims to define why people decide to do something, how long they sustain the activity, and how much effort they will expend to pursue it. Considering that there is no single theory that can comprehensively cover the possible motives, this study investigates the L2 motivation with the self as its core, which is found closely related to three motivation frameworks: Socio-education theory, self-determination theory, and L2 motivational self-system. This study found that L2 learners of Mandarin were highly driven by intrinsic motivation such as knowledge, culture, language learning stimulation, and accomplishment. They were less likely to be motivated by external pressures such as the ought-to L2 self or introjected opinions and showed a highly self-decisive multilingual profile with a willingness to diversify their knowledge and skills. Finally, Mandarin learning had positively contributed to their overall well-being during COVID-19.

Food, Identity, and Teaching With Media

While immigrating to the United States of America, ethnically Chinese immigrants faced many challenges. However, many found the best way to America's heart is through her stomach, creating American-style Chinese food. Learning about such cross-cultural cuisine exposes CSL students to their own culture and the colorful tapestry of Chinese food culture. This chapter will delve into the origins and development of Chop Suey (雜碎), General Tso's Chicken (左宗棠鷄), and Gua Bao (刈包), along with food's relation to cultural identity in The Search for General Tso (2015) and Fresh Off the Boat (2014-present). By exploring the cross-cultural link between Taiwanese, Chinese, and American dish variations, CSL teachers could gain insight on teaching with media and designing food culture lesson plans for American CSL classrooms.

A Framework for Meaningful Assessment

This chapter illustrates an innovative and easily adoptable approach to ensuring assessment is constructively aligned to course content and intended learning outcomes in foreign language teaching. Referring to two small-scale case studies in UK universities, this chapter presents the PRIME model of assessment design. This holistic and process-driven approach to assessment, in which the content and format of assessment is developed alongside the content and learning outcomes of the course, guides students towards becoming reflective language learners and creates greater learner autonomy. Grounded in, but not exclusive to, the academic standards for higher education in the UK, and in current research into the place and purpose of assessment in undergraduate courses, this chapter illustrates an approach adopted to create meaningful assessment in language degree programmes.