How the Pandemic Has Changed Us as Learners: From Theory to Practice by Prof. María del Carmen Méndez Santos

How the Pandemic Has Changed Us as Learners: From Theory to Practice by Prof. María del Carmen Méndez Santos

The Washington University Foreign Language Learning Colloquium Speaker Series presents: Dr. María del Carmen Méndez Santos, Professor at the Section of General Linguistics, Department of Language, Literature, Theory of Literature, and Linguistics at the University of Alicante (Spain)

Visitors are encouraged to complete self-screeing beforehand.

How the Pandemic has Changed Us as Learners: From Theory to Practice

Our daily lives have changed drastically in recent years due to Covid-19. Governments made the decision of moving from face-to-face classes to instruction online. But what we did was not traditional “online learning” because we were in the middle of a crisis. Therefore, we should, more appropriately, speak of “emergency distance education” (EDE). In this lecture, we will reflect on the main challenges faced during the pandemic and demotivational factors connected to it while considering different types of focus-group research. We consider, in particular, a study with learners of Spanish from Latvia. The findings of this study suggest that the greatest challenge of returning to a “new normal” concern increased difficulty with concentrating, anxiety about returning to the face-to-face settings, and feelings of disillusion and “pointlessness” tied to learning.

The Washington University Foreign Language Learning Colloquium Speaker Series is sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Applied Linguistics; the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.