Problem Solving in the COVID-19 ERT University Classroom

This paper deals with pragmatic aspects of Emergency Remote Teaching adopted in an academic setting as a COVID-19 containment strategy. We consider an intensive introductory course in English Language and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna by the author of this study (30 academic hours). Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, the first half of the course was taught full distance, synchronically on Microsoft Teams, while the second part was administered live, with part of the audience present in the physical classroom, and the rest connected online from home. Lessons were videorecorded and transcribed using Microsoft Stream, and subsequently stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatised corpus in English. As the study is methodologically grounded in corpus pragmatics (Aijmer/Rühlemann 2015), both corpus findings and videorecordings are analysed pragmatically for metacommunicative expressions (Bazzanella 2002, 2010), and metadiscursively for markers of interactivity (Hyland 2005: 49). The results show that the root cause of most pragmatic accidents (as revealed, in corpus data, by the frequency of hesitations, apologies, and other expressions of uncertainty and doubt) is a contextual mismatch arising from the fact that the same lecture is administered simultaneously to students on campus and online. Despite some positives, e.g., more interactivity (Luporini 2020) in comparison with the fully in-person version of the course that was taught prepandemically (Fusari 2021), it is therefore suggested that hybrid teaching should be much more carefully planned if it is to continue after the pandemic.