ERROR ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ CLASSROOM DISCOURSE VIA GOOGLE MEET DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC FOR FUTURE TEACHING IMPROVEMENTS

Abstract

Ever since the spread of Covid-19 in Malaysia, schools were forced to close to prevent further spread of the virus amongst the students, teachers and staff. Thus, classes have been conducted via online platforms such as Google Meet. The purpose of this study is to uncover errors made by English language (EL) teachers in a private Islamic primary school which occurred during EL lessons conducted on Google Meet. The data was collected from ten video recordings of the EL teachers’ online class sessions with their students, two from each teacher. These teachers do not have formal qualification to teach English as a second language but were assigned to teach English to their primary school students due to their substantially good proficiency in English. The video recordings of the teachers’ classroom discourse were then transcribed to conduct error analysis by identifying, categorising and describing them. The types of errors produced by the teachers during their online EL classes can be classified as grammatical, lexical or pronunciation errors. Overall, the teachers demonstrated very minimal use of English in their lessons, mostly conducting their classes in Malay to help their students comprehend the lessons. The data from the recordings also revealed that the teachers produced grammatical errors the most probably due their lack of understanding of EL grammar rules. This is followed by lexical errors that can be due to direct translation from the first language. Finally, pronunciation errors were the least frequent as the teachers were mostly using Malay to deliver their lessons. It can be concluded from this study that errors derived from digital platforms can be used as reference to consciously raise teachers’ awareness of their errors to improve the accuracy of their EL productive skills as part of the post Covid-19 pandemic recovery plan in education.