High School Students’ Online Engagement During the Covid-19 Pandemic in China

Abstract

In order to prevent and control the negative effect of Covid-19 pandemic on education in China, schools at different levels were encouraged to adopt online teaching to ensure school education in good orders. This study aims to investigate high school students’ online engagement during the Covid-19 pandemic in an online English course offered to Changshun Senior High School of Nationalities in China. The participants were 287 senior high school students from this school who took online English courses during the pandemic. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected based on the online engagement of learning English (OELE) survey. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to establish the factor structure of the high school students’ online engagement and the qualitative data were further analyzed. The quantitative results indicated that learners’ engagement of learning English in the online environment included four factors, namely cognitive engagement, behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and social engagement. The qualitative results showed that teachers’ supervision and online management during online courses are important factors affecting high school students’ online engagement. Most of the students expected more supervision and interaction when learning online. Particularly, more question-and- answer sessions and group discussions could be designed for online courses. This study also showed the significance of reinterpreting students’ online engagement in ethnic minority regions, which can be a significant prerequisite for online language learning.