Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Online in an Iranian EFL High School Context during the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe and the transition of education to fully online teaching in Iran, high school English teachers who were accustomed to teaching offline had to face a lot of challenges during this shift. In this paper, we describe the major challenges or dilemmas the first author had to surmount during his online English teaching to a group of senior high school students in the 2020-2021 academic year, how he managed to resolve those dilemmas (e.g., in teaching reading) under the second author's expert guidance, and the opportunities afforded to him by this experience. The paper has implications for teachers who teach in similar English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and who are confronted with similar challenges.