STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE ON LEARNING ENGLISH ESSAY WRITING WITH TEACHER’S APPLICATION OF ONLINE TOOLS

Abstract

Recently, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic which has broadly initiated the rise of digital literacy and teaching has inevitably been taking place on online platform. Converted from the conventional teaching mode to the online mode, both teachers and students certainly faced difficulties, especially in the area of EFL. Teaching and learning English essay writing has always been a challenging task for EFL teachers and learners. This paper aims to examine the non-English major third-year students‟ experience on learning an English Essay Writing course with teacher‟s application of online tools at University of Foreign Language Studies-The University of Da Nang (UFLS-UD). 22 Oriental Studies major thirdyear students attending the course Viet luan tieng Anh-01 DPH (English Essay Writing course-01 DPH) in academic year 2021-2022 were surveyed with questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Data analysis shows that students experienced many difficulties in learning English Essay Writing virtually, among which the most difficult one is “Lacking face-to-face communication in solving group tasks….” Their feedback on the efficiency of the online tools applied in the course was also detected. Some suggestions for improving the quality of teaching and learning English Essay Writing with the help of online tools were also proposed.