Listening to the Voices of International Students Shifting to Online Instruction

• In Event: Young and adult language learners

Proposal

Previous research has indicated that online instruction has emerged as a way to reduce barriers to accessing education (Pawan, Weichart, Warren & Park, 2016). While on-line instruction for language teaching has been an established mode of English instruction (Gherwash & Paiz, 2020), most of the focus has been on the teacher preparation and teacher’s experience (Atmojo & Nugroho, 2020; Brinkley-Etzkorn, 2018; Schmidt, Tschida & Hodge, 2016). This study addresses the gap in the current research by focusing on a qualitative research project that examined the experiences and attitudes of international students in an academic English course that were forced to migrate to online instruction during the pandemic of 2020.
Given the expanding views of distance education that has transcended national borders many international students have faced the double obstacles of learning within a new culture as well as learning in an on-line environment (Sadykova & Meskill, 2019). Previous research about international students who have studied English via distance has found that students tend to be content with the manner of interaction that online platforms provided (Lee, 2020). However, international students may face an adjustment issue if the power distance that they encounter in an on-line platform is different from the norms that are practiced in their previous schooling. Therefore, international students may face linguistic and cultural challenges in their efforts to participate in an online English environment. This study seeks to identify the struggles that the students encountered and the strategies that they chose to embrace in order to address these obstacles for a sustainable period of language study.
This study adopted a pre and post format where the study examined student essays that were written at the outset of the pandemic and then again at the end of the semester after completing the semester through online instruction. The research questions for this study were as follows: What challenges did the students encounter when they migrated to on-line English learning? What strategies did the students find to be most helpful to learning English through an on-line platform? The data was analyzed using a transformative learning model (Mezirow, 1991) to analyze the participants sensemaking and professional learning of their experience of transitioning to an on-line teaching model. The themes of this data set were identified through repeated readings of the data set by the research team members. The foci of the different questions created a diverse set of data, the themes were identified across interview questions so that the researchers could interpret the data to answer the research questions rather than just organizing the data (Maguire & Delahunt, 2017).
Findings in this study revealed that the students expressed facing various challenges during their online transition, ranging from technology and connectivity issues to difficulty engaging with their classmates and instructors. Interestingly, these concerns seemed to increase as the students continued to study online.. Initially students touted the benefit of having additional time to work without the need to commute to campus, but even that benefit seems to have waned for many. Such a decline may have been due to the fact that the need for interaction remained significantly high because students were studying from home and experiencing social isolation In addition, students often expressed the need to employ strategies related to avoiding distractions that interfere with class engagement. Therefore, the students acknowledged having to assume more responsibility for classroom concentration. After describing the themes of the findings, the presentation will empower participants by offering practical suggestions for supporting international students in online English instruction to address the concerns that the participants expressed. The session will conclude with a discussion of how participants supported international students in their bid to achieve equilibrium as they participated in online instruction.

Authors

• Gwendolyn Mae Williams, Auburn University

• Mary Stephens Diamond, Auburn Global