The year 2020 will be remembered with infamy, forever scarred by the omnipresent fear of COVID-19. 2020 was a brutal year for everyone: workers, parents, children, students and teachers. Northern Kentucky University was not spared either from COVID-19’s cold, icy grip.

When NKU closed in mid-March 2020, students and teachers did their best to adapt to this new reality, struggling to grasp the new normal. Three years later, classes have returned to in-person formats, and professors in the Department of World Languages and Literatures have noticed a worrying trend: students who first studied a language during the pandemic are struggling in a post-pandemic environment.

“I still remember, vividly, that day,” Makoto Nakamura, a lecturer of Japanese at NKU said about his experience during the shift to remote learning. “I received an email from the upper administration: ‘Starting next week… every single classroom will be virtual,’ and I thought, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ No training, nothing. I had never taught online.”

Due to the closure of campus grounds, professors were unable to access their own offices, having to take what they could with them before the campus closed. “I had one week to redesign four courses,” Nakamura recalled with agony. “The last thing I wanted to do was to inconvenience my students.”

When asked whether he was worried that remote learning would not pair well with learning Japanese, Nakamura explained that he was not worried about it, as he was not confident in it working well to begin with. 

“I was not concerned because I knew that it wasn’t going to work,” Nakamura said. 

One thing that Nakamura noticed during and after the period of remote learning was that students who enrolled in Elementary Japanese during the pandemic seemed to be much further behind those who were enrolled in Intermediate or Advanced Japanese at the start or height of the pandemic.

“I could see the difference between those who took Japanese online and those who took Japanese prior to the lockdown. The difference in the amount of Japanese learned was significant,” he continued. “Upper division classes… were a lot easier because the students already knew quite a bit of Japanese, and intermediate Japanese was also okay. But 101, to a certain degree, would be a challenge.”

Another professor who experienced the anxiety of teaching during the pandemic was Dr. Caryn Connelly, head of the World Languages and Literatures Department, as well as an associate professor of Spanish. While she is only able to teach one course per semester due to her role as head chair of the department, she still taught students during the pandemic.

“I was in — on the one hand as a professor — a fortunate position,” Connelly said. “I only had one class to figure out how I was gonna do this online. Whereas the rest of the faculty in my department and throughout [NKU] had three to four classes to figure out how they were gonna do this online.”

When it comes to fields of study, learning a new language presents unique challenges. Other areas like math, science or history can be learned in a variety of ways: some YouTube channels are dedicated to these areas; websites like Wikipedia exist as a quick, convenient and public source of information on anything; textbooks serve as a veritable fount of knowledge.

But with a language, an individual also needs to practice speaking that language with a fluent native speaker. “It’s important to have classroom experience because it provides that necessary interaction and exchange back and forth with either teacher-student or student-to-student,” Connelly said.

When asked if she had concerns about how well students would perform in learning a language during the pandemic, Connelly expressed concern about the performance of students during that time — not just from her point of view, but from other professors in the department as well.

“We talked about how we don’t think that students are processing and retaining information in the same way,” she explained. “They’re not engaged with the material, with the classroom, with the professors, with their peers in the same way.” She also remarked that, despite COVID-19 no longer being as dreaded or feared as it was before, there is still a lingering ripple effect on education — not just for language learning but also for other areas.

“I still think there’s residual effects of having gone through that experience not only for students, but for professors as well,” Connelly said.

One group that shouldn’t go unnoticed are the students themselves. One student in particular, Blue Adams, vice president of NKU’s French Club, shared stories of their own experience and of friends who were learning during the pandemic. Adams explained how, while it isn’t particularly difficult to get a good grade in those classes, they weren’t getting sufficient practice with the language.

“The thing with online classes is that, the way it’s formatted, you don’t have to think too hard to get a good grade. So they were just kind of getting by and getting a good grade, but they weren’t practicing the language and they weren’t really setting a foundation that helped them succeed in the language,” said Adams.

One particular aspect that Adams noticed after the remote learning period had ended and classes returned to in-person learning, is that professors have taken elements which worked with online learning and brought them to the classroom.

“Even though classes are in person now, I can see where professors are using online elements and they’re learning the good things about how, having courses online, even though in-person classes are better than having only online classes, there are some good things and there were some advantages to the online format or platform,” said Adams.