Primary school Turkish-English teachers' perceptions towards online teaching process: Challenges and experiences

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the socio-economic policies of nations around the world. To provide continuity of education, online teaching has appeared as one of the approaches in schools around the world. However, online teaching brought many challenges besides its numerous advantages. Both curriculum and instruction are required to be well adapted to the circumstances. One group of teachers who have been affected by this rapid transition was primary school English teachers due to dealing with online teaching and primary level students. Therefore, this research aims to gain insight into the perceptions of the primary school Turkish citizen-English Teachers towards online teaching. This research also aims to provide deeper understanding on teachers' attitudes, their experience with educational technologies as well as their perceived barriers and incentives towards online teaching. Participants were 95 primary school English teachers consisting of 10 males (10.5%) and 85 females (89.5%) from several private schools in Turkey. Quantitative data was collected by a questionnaire (Moukali, 2012) which was adapted from its 'Blended Learning' origin into 'Online Teaching' via special permission (Appendix C) from the author. Data analyses involved descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and independent t-test conducted in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results of this study revealed that: Primary school English teachers had positive attitudes towards online teaching (M=3.40, SD=1.17) on a five-point Likert scale although few (N=22) reported online teaching as a barrier since it did not provide an effective language learning process for primary school students (M=2.85, SD=1.37). In addition to this, more than half of the participants (N=46) stated that online teaching supported their technology-based skills (M=4.02, SD=1.06). There was not found a statistically significant difference between age groups of the participants' attitudes towards online teaching (F(2, 91)=.542, p=.586) and their perceived barriers in online teaching (F(2, 91)=.410, p=.665). Age groups of participants (20-30, 31-40, 41-50) also did not show any statistically significant differences in participants' educational technology experiences (F(2, 91)=.542, p=.584). Moreover, there was no statistically significant difference between English Language Teaching (ELT) graduates and English Literature graduates in terms of their attitudes (t(73)=-0.39, p=0.493), barriers (t(73)=-0.88, p=.111) and incentives (t(73)=.179, p=493) towards online teaching. Key Words: Online Teaching, Online Teaching Experiences, Adaptation to Online Teaching, Primary School English Teachers, Online Education, Barriers, Incentives