LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING DURING EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING: ARE LEARNERS REALLY ENGAGED?

Abstract

This study analyzed the students’ engagement in emergency remote teaching (ERT) environment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The subjects were 49 business-majored students at a university in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. The research was drawn upon Moore’s interaction framework with the adoption of a 5-Likert scale questionnaire to examine learner-content, learner-learner and learner-instructor engagement. Open-ended questions at the end of the survey and videos synchronous classroom observations from four lessons provided insights into students’ perceptions and behaviors. The quantitative result reveals learner-instructor engagement to be the strongest among the three categories, and the lack of interaction with their peers was the most frequently observed and reported. The fundamental cause lies in the loss and lack of human interactions. The engagement of both learner-learner and learner-instructor were dwarfed by superficial interaction in synchronous learning platforms. The paper ends with some recommendations to increase students’ learning engagement in the uncertain times of ERT.