Social and Technological Renovation in Online Second Language Teaching: A Post-COVID-19 Study of Pedagogy and Its Implication

Jacques de Vaucanson invented the digesting duck in the year 1739, and there was a proposal of launching fully automated cars in the year 2020 made by Tesla Company; one can witness the monstrous development in technology in the last four centuries. Furthermore, in the past few decades, attempts and inventions are made to digitalize every possible knowledge that is available and documented in the form of books, tape recorders, video recorders and so on. Scientists, academicians, educationists, engineers, and people from all discipline get united in the one platform called internet, to access knowledge and to deliver the same in digital form. This internet or famously referred as “the second world/virtual world” is expanding and exploding with knowledge and information. Similarly, way before the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching–learning programmes were digitalized and were offered by educational institutions through online. Online teaching–learning was the most sort out programme that gradually replacing the distance education system in the last decade. One such example is the IGNOU’s success in distance education, which eventually paved way for online learning. Thereby, even though we have rushed into the online platform during the pandemic, we should be aware that online learning is not entirely alien to us. Moving further post-COVID-19, the internet indeed has brought a paradigm shift in the fundamental way of teaching, and this paper is an attempt to understand the culture of technology in academics. Marshall McLuhan in his book “Understanding Media” remarks technology as an extension of human, and the paper carries this idea into the language-learning scenario to find its helpfulness in online second language teaching and learning.