“COVID-19 Challenged Me to Re-Create My Teaching Entirely”: Adaptation Challenges of Four Novice EFL Teachers of Moving from ‘Face-to-Face’ To ‘Face-to-Screen’ Teaching

Language teaching is noted to be a stressful profession at the best of times, but in 2020 it became even more difficult for all teachers because of the spread of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. Teachers were required to switch suddenly to deliver their lessons on online platforms, with many having little or no prior training. This has certainly been the case for language teachers, language students and language schools because most language courses, initially designed for face-to-face instruction, were suddenly ‘forced’ to move to online platforms. This sudden move meant that language schools, language teachers and their students needed to adapt fast to a new virtual world that for many was an unknown teaching world. For language teachers the main challenge was how to adapt their courses and lessons to make them suitable for this new online delivery mode. This paper reports on the reflections of the adaptation challenges of four English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers at a prominent English language institution in Costa Rica, Central America, as they suddenly had to shift to online lesson delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic.