Emergency online teaching: Voices of Hong Kong CALL lecturers

Little attention has been given to computer-assisted language teaching (CALL) lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong. In this chapter, we present a novel study of CALL lecturers’ emotions and well-being while coping with emergency remote teaching (ERT) at a community college in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this study sheds light on emergency CALL teaching design and technical preparation, as well as synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and assessment in this context. We employed interviews to give vivid accounts of four CALL lecturers’ inner voices. The resulting data were coded and grouped into themes, and we report the findings as narrative accounts from the representative lecturers and in-depth thematic descriptions. We found that, overall, the CALL lecturers were stressed and overworked, and their physical conditions, especially eyesight, were impaired due to long-term online activities. They were also concerned about the quality of delivery, student feedback, student learning outcomes, and privacy issues. The analysis further revealed practical strategies that the lecturers adopted to address the difficulties they faced during the pandemic. Based on these strategies and the interviews, we present a conceptual emergency adjustment (EA) model to help understand the experiences, emotions, and well-being of CALL lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research offers a significant contribution to the EA literature and the contextual adaptation of CALL lecturers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. In addition, the use of narrative accounts to present data could contribute to methodological developments in studying teaching and learning in an ERT environment. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.