Mufit Şenel
Abstract
The outbreak of Covid-19 changed many aspects of people all over the world, including the type of education and learning/teaching styles. Transferring from face-to-face education to distance education brought some difficulties and challenges for both teachers and students. Among those observed challenges ...
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The outbreak of Covid-19 changed many aspects of people all over the world, including the type of education and learning/teaching styles. Transferring from face-to-face education to distance education brought some difficulties and challenges for both teachers and students. Among those observed challenges and problems, one of the most important ones was related to distance listening courses at an ELT department of a state university in Turkey. In the literature, no related or similar studies to discover the perceptions of ELT students about the online listening courses. Therefore, this present study aimed at discovering the 2nd grade ELT students’ perceptions about the distance listening courses carried out throughout the Covid-19 period focusing on whether students had encountered any challenges. To collect data, a 30-item Likert-type questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used. Randomly selected students (12) and listening course teachers (4) were interviewed to reinforce the findings of the study. Findings put forward that a great majority of the participants and instructors had negative perceptions and attitudes about online listening courses. The results of this current research will be of benefit to university instructors and syllabus designers in taking future urgent decisions and measures regarding the implementation of distance learning and teaching programs for students from different backgrounds.
Adib Ahmadi Mahjoub; Mahboubeh Taghizadeh
Abstract
Satisfaction of online students is one of the important issues of online education, and identifying the predictors of satisfaction can improve the effectiveness and success of online education. This study thus aimed to investigate online students’ and instructors’ perceptions of the influential ...
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Satisfaction of online students is one of the important issues of online education, and identifying the predictors of satisfaction can improve the effectiveness and success of online education. This study thus aimed to investigate online students’ and instructors’ perceptions of the influential factors such as motivation, e-readiness, and barriers for online satisfaction and to determine the contribution of these factors to satisfaction. The participants were 114 online graduate students of TEFL and 5 online instructors at Iran University of Science and Technology. Four questionnaires on learning barriers, motivation, e-readiness, and satisfaction along with 4 open-ended questions were administered in this descriptive study. The results revealed that most of online students were satisfied with the online graduate program of TEFL as online instructors provided students with lesson summary and class material prior to the session, had interaction with students through social networks, and held the online classes after office hours. The results also showed that online students' motivation was mostly instrumental, and some were not completely ready for online education. The results of multiple regression analysis also indicated that the contribution of motivation to satisfaction was higher than that of readiness and barriers. Online instructors need to solve students’ educational problems to make them ready for online instruction and to foster students’ motivation, which are influential in enhancing their satisfaction with online learning programs.
Samira Abbasi; Azizeh Chalak; Hossein Heidari Tabrizi
Abstract
Enhancing speaking ability is an important component of the acquirement of a language. The present study focused on improving speaking ability through online strategy-based instruction. The innovation aspect of this study is applying the Moodle course management system as an instructional platform. To ...
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Enhancing speaking ability is an important component of the acquirement of a language. The present study focused on improving speaking ability through online strategy-based instruction. The innovation aspect of this study is applying the Moodle course management system as an instructional platform. To this end, a group of 80 Iranian female and male students at the intermediate level participated in the treatment. Participants of the study were divided into four groups of 20. The subjects in experimental groups benefited from two particular instructional focuses of this study include social and affective strategies. In order to assess the effect of the treatment pre and posttests design were utilized. Consequently, the data were analyzed through One-Way ANOVAs and t-tests. The findings revealed that strategy treatment was successful in improving the participants’ speaking ability. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of male and female treatment groups. Therefore, the findings suggest that online strategy-based instruction can positively influence the speaking ability of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. This study may have pedagogical implications for material practitioners, CALL package designers and distance learning planners to include strategy instruction in English courses.Keywords: Moodle, Online learning, Social and affective strategies, Speaking ability, Strategy instruction
