Teaching and Learning English Speaking Online with Google Classroom: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

 Since 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many disturbances in education, which enables the superiority of online learning worldwide and also in Vietnam. Among the learning-facilitating applications and platforms, Google Classroom has been chosen to serve the e-learning process in a university in central Vietnam, yet it is witnessing a controversy over its effectiveness and user satisfaction. This descriptive study aims to investigate the perceptions of lecturers and second-year students majoring in English Teacher Education in terms of its ease of use and usefulness, and the satisfaction of users towards Google Classroom. Also, the research is expected to explore the way they use Google Classroom in teaching and learning English-speaking skill, and the difficulties facing these users while using this application. To achieve these aims, two online surveys using the 5-point Likert scale were distributed to two groups of participants: 7 lecturers teaching speaking online and 74 random sophomores majoring in English Teacher Education. The data collected were analyzed with the assistance of IBM SPSS Statistic 22. The results suggest that most of the lecturers and students have a positive perception of Google Classroom, and they mainly use it as a platform for sharing materials, giving and collecting assignments and delivering feedback. As for the difficulties, not being able to create various practice-speaking activities and making real-time interactions on this application are the most common problems that teachers and learners encounter.