COVIDidactics: Adjusting Flipped Learning to Teach (English) Translation Remotely

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic during the second semester of the academic year 2019/2020 brought an unprecedented upheaval to all cycles of education, requesting teachers' resilience and flexibility for reviewing and adjusting their planned instructional contents to the relatively new online teaching framework. Drawing on a quantitative analysis of the positive outcomes resulting from a compulsory, anonymised and structured questionnaire completed by 87 Italian university students of English Translation, the chapter outlines the drawbacks and benefits that these students experienced from the adjustment of the flipped learning approach to their online English translation classes. A new perspective is offered by arguing that complementing this approach with a degree of humanistic teaching in a generally 'untact' environment enhanced students' meaningful learning and knowledge co-construction through dynamic participation, which also increased their appreciation for the module. The chapter provides a proposal for teaching (English) translation remotely at university and possibly, in other contexts.