Students’ positional identity in pandemic era

Abstract

Covid-19 is a very dangerous virus. It makes the activities in the worlds stopped. The countries who’s attacked this virus restricts all of the activities. One of them is Indonesia. Covid-19 entered Indonesia on February. In the middle of March, the government has set a lockdown for all offices, trades, education and other activities. Especially in education, all of the schools have dismissed all the students and teachers until right now. All the activities in the teaching-learning process have done online. It raises several problems, one of them is students’ ability in understanding the lesson who given by teacher via online has decreased, especially in learning English. This study aims to know the students’ positional identity in pandemic era. The data took from the students’ story and interview. The analysis of data described in sentences. It means this study is descriptive qualitative research. The subjects of research are 20 students of the second semester of English Education Department at Unisla. The result showed that almost 50% of students have positioned themselves as poor learners for this pandemic because of several reasons. Two of them; they cannot understand well about the material when the teacher explained by online and they have difficulty in getting internet networks in their villages. Considering the problems above, the government and educators are expected to be able to solve those problems faced by students in this pandemic era. So, in the future the study is going to analyse the educators’ strategies in teaching English by online.

Keywords : Online Class, Students’ skills, EFL, Positional Identity