Teachers' Readiness for Online Language Teaching

The current study presents the narrative inquiry results of a survey that explores teachers' lived experiences of transitioning to online teaching amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the Iranian EFL context. The collected data from 28 teachers through a qualitative questionnaire were analyzed to understand how EFL teachers perceived their readiness for online teaching, what challenges they encountered during the transition, and how they developed their online teaching skills to overcome the obstacles. The findings established that EFL teachers were employed a restricted CALL before the pandemic in their classes. Also, their knowledge of online teaching was inadequate. Moreover, they were not well-prepared for such a massive transition from face-to-face to online teaching. This unanticipated transition brought about many challenges, but EFL teachers set out to develop their online teaching skills to overcome such obscurities. Most of the teachers' development was through self-development and nested within micro and mesosystems. The findings showed that a successful shift to online teaching is not achievable only by teachers' self-development but several layers of micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems are involved. Apart from contributing to Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) literature, this study provides valuable insights to CALL teacher educators and professional development course designers, and decision-makers.