Synchronous Online Learning During COVID-19: Chinese University EFL Students’ Perspectives

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 had soon become a pandemic, leading to the lockdown of schools all around the world. To mitigate the negative impacts brought by COVID-19, the educational institutions of all levels have inevitably shifted from face-to-face teaching to online teaching. For English language teaching, fully synchronous online learning has been implemented worldwide, posing a great challenge for both instructors and learners. This study reports on findings of Chinese university English as a foreign language students’ perspectives’ on synchronous online language learning during the pandemic, with a special focus on their encountered difficulties. Drawing on the qualitative interview method, the study investigated 14 EFL learners at a public comprehensive university in a coastal city in southern China. Using thematic analysis, there are four main difficulties identified in the interviews, namely the lack of learning climate, the cultivation of learner autonomy, changes of interaction patterns, and the adaptation to remote assessment. The paper ends with a discussion of findings and implications for English learning and teaching in the “new normal.”