EFL Teaching and Learning via Zoom during COVID-19: Impacts of Students’ Engagement on Vocabulary Range and Reading Comprehension Skills

Abstract

The social distancing policy by nearly 200 countries and territories (Le et al., 2020) due to the quick widespread of the COVID-19 Pandemic triggered the online learning mode via various platforms, including Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meets or Hangouts. This change left many teachers and stakeholders concerns about creating and maintaining a virtual but dynamic and engaging EFL learning environment. Since the size of vocabulary and reading comprehension play an important role in acquiring other skills in English learning (Amirzai, 2021; Hartshorn et al., 2017), this study aimed to investigate the impacts of EFL students’ engagement when studying reading online through Zoom on the performance of vocabulary and reading comprehension. Forty-four intermediate-level students at a public university in Vietnam were placed into a control group and an experimental group based on the results of a pre-test. While students in the control group followed the traditional format with the teacher-centred mode, those in the experimental group experienced the student-centred mode with frequent use of breakout rooms for pair work, group work and screen sharing for giving answers, elaborating on explanations and hosting vocabulary activities. After ten weeks, all the participants were required to take the post-test and particularly those in the experimental group were asked to complete a questionnaire on their attitudes towards this new learning style. Descriptive statistics of the post-test scores indicated that the experimental students outperformed the control students in vocabulary and reading comprehension. Findings from the questionnaire revealed overall satisfaction towards this learning style, and more interestingly, there appeared a correlation between students’ attitudes and the post-test scores.