Perceptions of EFL tertiary students towards the correlation between e-learning and learning engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic
Keywords:
perceptions, EFL, tertiary, e-learning, learning engagement, COVID-19 pandemicAbstract
It is true that education is one of the fields affected by the spread of COVID-19. Many countries, including Vietnam, have implemented online learning at a national scale to every level of education to adapt to the circumstance. In teaching English at university, the implementation's efficacy remains debatable since it may intensify the challenges that are already problematic in traditional English schooling. Among those arduous problems, student engagement is the focus of this qualitative study. Specifically, the paper examines how Vietnamese non-English major undergraduates perceive the influence of e-learning on their engagement in studying the language. Regarding the literature, online learning with its benefits and shortcomings is firstly reviewed, which is followed by the scrutiny of student engagement in general and in English learning. The review is then concluded by inspecting several relevant studies.
A focus group interview is applied to collect data, which is also considered a gap of this study since the groups of interviewees only come from one university in Ho Chi Minh city. The findings are expected to provide more insights into the degree of student engagement in English online learning in higher education, thus calling for more effort to be exerted in seeking appropriate strategies to promote Vietnamese EFL graduates’ engagement in their e-learning.
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