Experiences of Six East Asian Graduate Students in Online Courses
Abstract
International student enrollments and online courses enrollments in the United States have been increasing. As today’s society has more different paradigms and educational worlds expand their field into online education, there are more culturally and ethnically diverse students in educational fields. International students mostly confront adaptation issues, but sociocultural differences could be big issues especially for East Asian students because their sociocultural values are different from Western sociocultural values. This suggests that communication is important for both instructors and East Asian students in order to understand East Asian students’ sociocultural experiences in online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language) courses. The three research questions are: 1) What are the experiences of East Asian students in online TESOL courses? 2) What are the sociocultural experiences that East Asian students encounter when taking online TESOL courses? 3) What strategies do East Asian students use to facilitate their learning in online TESOL courses? The main instrument for collecting data was a qualitative study with face-to-face interviews in order to understand East Asian students’ experiences better and obtain rich data regarding phenomena and issues.
Five themes were generated from the interviews: (1) keeping silent, (2) classroom differences, (3) positive attitude, (4) sociocultural experiences, (5) online learning strategies. Specifically, sociocultural experiences included language barriers and English proficiency, communication and preferences, a sense of belonging, and iii content materials. For East Asian students, communication was the most important part in online learning.
Subject
Distance educationEast Asian students
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language
Sociocultural perspectives
Citation
Leem, Ji Soo (2017). Experiences of Six East Asian Graduate Students in Online Courses. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /187228.