Exploring challenges and opportunities of EFL teachers in Thailand during emergency remote teaching

The objectives of this research were: 1) to investigate the challenges and the opportunities of Thai EFL teachers during emergency remote teaching; and 2) to develop the questionnaire to explore challenges and opportunities of Thai EFL teachers during emergency remote teaching. The population of this study was Thai EFL teachers working in large to extra-large size public secondary schools and teaching English Foundation courses online during emergency remote teaching. The participants included two groups: 10 teachers for exploring challenges and opportunities and developing a questionnaire; and 300 teachers for verifying the presented challenges and opportunities. The research instruments were the interview form and the questionnaire. The thematic analysis, the exploratory factor analysis and the descriptive statistics were used to analyze the gathered data. The findings of this research revealed that: 1) The participants reported in the interviews that they experienced the challenges during emergency remote teaching including the following: technological difficulties, English-language teaching struggles, unreliable assessment and evaluation, ineffective classroom management, lost relationships, and individual student unreadiness while the opportunities were as follows: knowledge and skill improvement for online teaching, motivation for professional development, reduction of teacher workload, English-language skill teaching opportunities, more effective on-site teaching, and application to other duties. 2) The developed questionnaire consisted of six challenges with one revised name: technological difficulties, English-language teaching struggles, unreliable assessment and evaluation, difficulties in selecting and delivering engaging English course content, lost relationships, and individual student unreadiness. In terms of opportunities, there were five of them with one revised name as follows: knowledge and skill improvement for online teaching; motivation for professional development; reduction of teacher workload; English-language teaching opportunities, and application to other duties. 3) The challenge that received the highest level of agreement from participants was individual student unreadiness while of all opportunities, the participants agreed with motivation for professional development the most.