English as a Foreign Language Teachers’ Challenges of their Online Instruction during the Covid-19 Outbreak in Cambodia

Abstract

The field of digital education like online teaching is dynamic and constantly evolving. Online teaching reflects and adapts based on the changes in each country’s socio-cultural, demographic, and political aspects. Thus, there is a need to comprehend the activities in the field in order to better inform future research. This study aimed to examine EFL teacher’s challenges of their online teaching introduced by Siddiquei and Kathpal (2021) through the six main constructs: students, institution support, teachers themselves, teaching contents, motivation, and technological infrastructure. The study surveyed 160 EFL teachers by employing purposive sampling. These participants were asked to complete the online surveyed questionnaire one time within a three-week period. About 127 questionnaires were completed and returned to the researcher. The study found that EFL teachers reported that they strongly agreed that they had challenges associated with developing their teaching contents to suit their online instruction whereas they just agreed that they had various challenges associated with their students, teachers themselves, their motivation, and technological infrastructure during their online instruction. Furthermore, their demographic characteristics comprising their age, number of years of teaching experience, school status (private versus public), school location (city/urban versus rural), qualification level (bachelor’s degree versus master’s degree), and monthly income level had been found to significantly influence on their online teaching challenges. The findings of this current study had various implications for policy and practices for advancing digital education within EFL and general education contexts in Cambodia. The study concluded with recommendations for future research directions.