TEACHING IN COVID PANDEMIC: THE CASE OF SPANISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN SERBIA

Abstract

Since all universities in Serbia switched to some form of distance learning at the start of the pandemic crisis in 2020, this paper tries to analyze the beginnings of online teaching and the opinions of Hispanic Studies professors (Language, Literature and Culture). The aim was to highlight the problems and challenges facing teaching staff in public universities of higher education in Serbia, with a focus on the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. In order to extract essential data for this empirical research, an anonymous survey referring to Spanish (as a foreign language) distance learning at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad and the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac. The survey, conducted in March 2022, contained five questions. A quantitative analysis was performed that included only descriptive statistics - frequencies and percentages. The research shows that the urgent implementation of alternative online forms of Spanish language teaching in public faculties in Serbia, due to the coronavirus pandemic, presented Spanish language teachers with a great challenge in terms of the complete organization of teaching, but it also revealed some new and positive aspects of distance education that they had not known until then.