From face-to-face tuition to online classes: ‘Re-styling’ a course of English for academic purposes

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing total lockdown in 2020, the EAP course for STEM doctoral students at Parma University (Italy) was suddenly forced to online delivery, like many courses in academic institutions worldwide. Confined at home and with no previous experience in remote teaching, the teacher had to redesign the course and rethink strategies and techniques in a matter of days and with little material at hand. The aim was to maintain the interactivity of the face-to-face course and consolidate the group dynamics of a course that had yet to start. As online teaching took centre stage, the teacher and students alike were confronted with didactic issues stemming from the restyling of a traditionally highly interactive course based on face-to-face tuition, and technical problems, which added to the emotional and psychological factors related to an unknown, unexpected situation. In addition to soft skills, students from different academic backgrounds needed to develop productive rather than receptive language skills, so activities focused mainly on collaborative tasks to develop writing and speaking modes but did not concentrate on academic language only. This paper shares insights into the experience of being ‘thrown in at the deep end’, and attempts to highlight the elements which contributed to its overall positive outcome, the strong social connotation it came to bear, the development of class dynamics, and the learning points that emerged. It also hopes to provide some practical suggestions which can add to the creative solutions found by (language) teachers globally.