iranian efl learners’ diffusion of emergency remote language learning (erll): a qualitative study

Coronavirus disease (covid-19) has triggered severe disruption in economic, social, and cultural dynamics around the globe. english language learning also suffered from challenges due to the pandemic, with language learners all over the world experiencing displacement, disconnect, and disengagement from formal language schooling. in this line, recent studies have tended to explore students' perceptions and attitudes toward erl, particularly their emotional sides, while the cognitive side of their attitudes toward erl has remained poorly documented. to cover the current gap, the present qualitative study applied the diffusion of innovation theory (doi) to explore learners' cognitive attitudes toward erl. consequently, we purposefully selected 33 iranian efl learners from seven cities and explored their perceptions about the erl of language. the result of the deductive content analysis portrayed that the erl provides a flexible context for the students to learn language by engaging their audio and visual senses via various channels. however, lack of power, stable internet speed, face-to-face communication, and teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) soar the perceived complexities of erl. regarding the relative advantage, the participants place a premium on online language learning over traditional language learning due to erl's cost-saving and self-paced language learning features. the study stresses the importance of accelerating iranian infrastructures for distance education and running some computer-assisted language learning (call) workshops for language teachers to upgrade their language teaching approaches.