The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been varied, and while there was a clear upsurge in the use of technology in language and learning contexts during the worst lockdown periods, the long-term impact on technology usage remains to be seen. As has been widely noted, lockdowns forced teaching into remote modes, making technology indispensable. Many teachers found themselves struggling to use technologies with little or no experience or training, and often in spite of earlier resistance to using it. The affective barriers to using technology may have decreased somewhat, but other potential problems have arisen as well. There has generally been a narrow view about the effectiveness of technology use in language teaching and learning. During the pandemic, teaching often entailed using videoconferencing tools as a means of emulating face-to-face teaching, albeit inhibited by the limitations and the affordances of the technologies. While research into mobile learning prospered prior to the pandemic, long periods of lockdown saw them being used as little more than a backup for when other technologies experienced technical difficulties. In this paper, we discuss not only the often-cited positive effects of technology usage in language learning during COVID, but also the possible negative implications for how technology has come to be used and viewed by learners, teachers, and administrators. Suggestions for a potential way forward in this ‘aftermath’ of the pandemic are discussed, along with some guidelines for making the most of what we have learned about using technology for language learning in the future.

To understand in-service language teachers’ intrinsic barriers to technology integration in higher education contexts, this in-depth study investigated four teachers teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at a private university in Japan. The researcher trained the four teachers with varied digital literacy how to create and utilise online materials in a dedicated Moodle site, and the teachers’ training processes, as well as actual classroom practices, were then observed. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected over three semesters, including: (1) a pilot survey before Moodle integration to access the teachers’ attitudes and expectation of educational technology use; (2) classroom observations to investigate how the participants use technology in their CFL classroom; (3) audio recordings and field notes collected in a workshop and interviews to explore reasons behind behaviours; and (4) access logs in Moodle to determine the participants’ engagement through online materials inside and outside the classroom. The findings’ implications in terms of teachers’ experiences, emotions, competences, beliefs, motivations, and sociocultural factors affecting their determinations of technology integration in CFL classrooms in a Japanese higher-education setting are presented. Future considerations and ongoing challenges are discussed to highlight the implications for research, policymakers, teacher educators, and stakeholders.