Journal of English Language Teaching

Exploring and Designing New Teaching-Learning Spaces and Materials Post-Covid-19

Dr. Ruchi Kaushik

Associate Professor of English, Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi

Anju Sahgal Gupta

Keywords: Online instruction, language learning materials, learning spaces

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Abstract

Covid-19 changed the face of education, spurring teachers to forcibly shift from on-site to online instruction. However, with the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination drive all over the world, some schools/colleges have started, and others presumably will start, functioning offline soon albeit in a changed world of sanitization, masks and social distancing. The orthodox institutional strategy is likely to focus on short-term measures such as reconfiguring the classroom space by merely reducing/rearranging the existing furniture. But in order to effectively cope with the new-normal, we need to make imaginative use of institutional spaces, making them much more fluid with language materials being designed in such a way that multiple learning spaces such as playground/lawn, cafeteria and library are used by students for the same class simultaneously. In this paper, the authors build the case for exploring alternative institutional spaces and demonstrate some sample flexible English language materials designed by them for the same.

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