Distance language teacher & learner autonomy and motivation during the covid-19 lockdown the case of mohammed vi polytechnic university

Résumé

COVID-19 forced the world into a lockdown that made inevitable revisiting patterns of action in all fields, amongst them language education. The shift was sudden for most institutions, educators as well as students. From our institutional experience at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, the degree of success of the teaching/learning experience depended on many factors, among them teacher and learner autonomy and motivation. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the digital transition of the language courses offered by the Language Lab of Mohamed VI Polytechnic University from a teaching perspective as well as the language learner’s perspective. We will explore teacher autonomy and motivation and how that led to a relatively successful distance learning experience. We will also see how student autonomy and motivation facilitated the implementation of distance language courses using the flipped classroom method. The study showed the correlation between the years spent at the university and the levels of autonomy and motivation among students. The period studied is the second semester of the 2019/2020 academic year, mainly from the first weeks of the lockdown. We also evoke the lessons learnt and the challenges that surfaced as we started all-distance language courses for first years and suggest ways to increase teacher/learner independence and motivation in distance language learning.