Saudi EFL Students' Perceptions toward the Online Interactions of Their Peers and Instructors

Abstract

The role of the instructor during the online L2 learning of Saudi English foreign language (EFL) students has been seen as essential in their online educational environment. This paper examines the quality of Saudi EFL students' online interactions. It aims at exploring how Saudi students perceive and view the online interactions of their peers and instructors to help promote their L2 learning in online educational discussion forums. Over an entire academic semester in a Saudi prestigious university, 49 EFL students were requested to interact online with their peers and instructors by discussing some argumentative topics. The data which were examined in this paper included participants' questionnaires and interviews. Quantitative and qualitative analysis methods were employed. The findings of the present study show that Saudi EFL students perceived their instructor-student online interactions more positively than their student-student online interactions. They valued the online interactions of their EFL instructors as more important and useful for their L2 learning than the online interactions of their EFL peers. It was concluded that the online presence of instructors appeared to encourage their students to think critically, express their thoughts, and develop their grammatical and spelling accuracy. Further research should look at how students perform their second language (L2) and maintain their social presence during student-student and instructor-student online exchanges.