teachers’ perspectives on the problems of implementing lesson plans in online high school english classes

Lesson plans and their enactment are the key to effective language teaching. however, scant research has been conducted on exploring the problems which occur in the teachers' enactment of lesson plans in online classes. to address this gap, four iranian efl teachers participated in the current study to investigate their problems for implementing their lesson plans in high school efl classrooms. the design of the study was descriptive, and the teachers’ reflective notes were the data source. by content analysis of the data collected from reflective notes from 32 sessions, it was found that the main challenges that the teachers encountered in implementing lesson plans in classrooms were related to the content, time budgeting, students' lack of interest, and unpredicted problems. among these problem categories, the most common one resulted from the content of the lesson plan. furthermore, the findings showed that the enactment problems consisted of general problems and the problems caused specifically by online teaching. the findings of this study can have pedagogical implications for efl teachers for developing better lesson plans and adopting more effective implementation strategies.