A Rapid Switch from Conventional Classroom Teaching to ERT: A study on university-level EFL students’ self-efficacy and motivational levels in Turkiye amidst devastating earthquakes

Abstract

When the devastating earthquakes took place in the cities of Kahramanmaras and Hatay on February 6, 2023, life in almost 11 cities in Turkiye came to a total halt. As a result, instruction in higher education and K-12 institutions was temporarily suspended. Eventually, the higher educational council (YÖK) decided to proceed with the learning through the means of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) while K-12 schools continued with their instruction via face-to-face education. The motive behind transforming learning to the online realm by YÖK was to use the university facilities and dormitories to accommodate the surviving victims of the catastrophes. Although the tragic event affected almost everyone throughout the country, this experiment found it worth investigating the extent of the educational impact this sudden shift to ERT had on university-level EFL learners’ self-efficacy and motivation. Thus, a mixed-methods experiment was conducted on 69 EFL learners of a small-sized university in the Mediterranean region of Turkiye with the Motivation to Learn Online Questionnaire (MLOQ) and an open-ended question set to identify emerging themes. The survey and the thematic analysis assessed the influence the rapid shift of instruction had on the learning attributes of the students in the aspects of self-efficacy, motivation, learning beliefs, and physiological and mental states. The results indicated that while motivation was not significantly impacted by the scheme to ERT, self-perceptions, learning perspectives, and the mental conditions of the participants were detrimentally influenced by the speedy transformation.

Keywords

• ERT
• online learning
• self-efficacy
• motivation
• EFL

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