English Foreign Language Teachers’ Lesson Preparation: A Comparison between Online and Face-to-Face Teaching

Abstract

Many universities have offered online courses and teachers have transitioned to online teaching. Many scholars have examined how teachers conducted their online teaching. However, a few studies have explored how teachers prepare their lessons for online courses and how different their preparation is in planning their online and offline teaching. Therefore, the current study investigated how the same English Foreign Language (EFL) teachers planned lessons for both online and face-to-face teaching. The study employed in-depth re-called interviews with ten EFL teachers from a public university in Vietnam. The study used a framework of three types of interactions (student-teacher, student-student, and student-content) to analyze the interaction patterns. Findings indicated that most teachers maintained similar planning strategies for both online and face-to-face teaching. Nevertheless, many teachers encountered challenges in planning student-student interaction in online classes and did not prepare student-content interaction in both teaching modalities. The study suggests implications for EFL teachers to plan lessons for both online and offline classes.