1. Teachers as Beacons in the Storm During the COVID-19 Pandemic -- 2. Study Background -- 3. Asynchronous Teaching: A Newly Discovered Resource -- 4. Synchronous Online Teaching Between Challenges and Opportunities -- 5. The Joys and Sorrows of Synchronous Hybrid Teaching -- 6. Pedagogical Implications for Future Teaching Scenarios.

This book provides educators (including but not limited to those at university level) with data-driven insights into video-mediated interaction. Drawing on extensive research on classroom interaction from a variety of theoretical and analytical perspectives, including four years of observing online university courses that began during the Covid-19 pandemic, the author provides deep insights into video-mediated interaction by comparing direct classroom observations with data provided by teachers and students via online questionnaires. The book clarifies how the newly experienced classroom contexts differ from traditional online and blended classes, then draws on the extensive experience of video-mediated instruction in terms of teacher-learner, learner-content, and learner-learner interaction to decipher what can be challenging and promising about interacting via a screen, specifically addressing multimodal interaction. It also provides practitioners with data-driven suggestions from the perspective of teachers and learners for improving teaching and learning in modern video-based educational contexts that are consistently different from the pre-pandemic idea of e-learning. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers in Applied Linguistics, Language Education and Higher Education more broadly, teachers in higher education institutions worldwide, and teacher education and training and institutional bodies responsible for improving teaching facilities. Antonella Giacosa has been an EFL teacher at secondary schools for over 20 years and an ELT lecturer at the foreign language department in Turin since 2017. She is an educational linguist interested in innovative, intercultural and transdisciplinary approaches in ELT. She is part of research teams working on the internationalisation and innovation of the curriculum at her school and university institutes in Italy and abroad. She is a reviewer for articles on distance learning in various scientific journals and has published several articles on emergency distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.