Teaching Grammar to Iraqi EFL Students of Al- Hamdaniya University during COVID-19 Pandemic: Problems and Solutions

Abstract

During the fight against Covid-19, schools and universities in Iraq and many other countries have been closed and digital learning has begun to take place. In this paper, the researchers have tried to identify the difficulties which faced students through Electronic Learning (hereafter, E-learning) during Covid-19. Inadequate instruction, lack of internet and electricity, little experience and low attendance are just some of the problems that our student face in this type of learning. To assess the benefit of such learning in Iraq, it is hypothesized in this paper that online learning has a bad impact on students’ performance be it spoken or written. To test the validity of the hypothesis, an online questionnaire of (3) items was given to (30) 4^th year students of English department to identify the problems and solutions to digital learning from their own perspective. Data was analyzed by using a mixed method (i:e both quantitative and qualtitative) because such method describes and interpretes statistical percentages. The results of the analysis show that the biggest problem for most of the students in particular in our country is that electricity and internet are not available all the time. Another conclusion is that some students personally are not interested in the subject of grammar. It has also been found that the best solution is to go back to classroom teaching or face to face communucation. The study provides some recommendations which can be of benefit to EFL teachers, students and probably to the teaching process in cases of emergency.