Learners’ Attitudes Towards Online Language Learning; 
And Corresponding Success Rates

Year 2013, Volume: 14 Issue: 2, 118 - 130, 01.06.2013

Emrah Cınkara Birsen Bagcecı

Abstract

Online teaching has long been a key area of interest recently in every field of education as well as English language teaching. Numerous hardware tools, such as, mp3 players, mobile devices, and so on; and software applications, such as, podcasts, wikis, learning management systems, and so on, have been used in distance and online instruction and they have proved to be useful in facilitating learning individually (Finger, Sun, & Jamieson-Proctor, 2010). Learning management systems (LMS) provide a virtual environment and various tools to support learning. The current institution where the researchers work deliver two 2-credit online English courses for a specific group of learners at a state university in south-eastern Turkey by using Modular Object Oriented Distance Learning Environment (MOODLE). Moodle is an open code LMS which provides teachers and course developers with numerous online tools to enhance distance learning/teaching environment. The course has both a synchronous and asynchronous instruction. Synchronous and asynchronous instructions are associated with the delivery of content in campus-based environments; however, their role differs in off the campus environments as they solve the problems of distance learners. Universities, colleges, and other education institutions are integrating online learning into every aspect of higher education. Many teachers and faculty members at higher education institutions who already run face-to-face courses have a website to post lecture notes or slide presentations as well as other course material. There is no doubt that these are effective strategies to expand teaching efforts. Still, there are other educators who design and teach totally online classes. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate learners’ attitudes towards these online language courses, and there are two objectives of this research. The first one is to discover learners’ attitudes towards the online English course; and the second purpose is to evaluate and correlate learners’ attitudes with their success determined with their end-of-the-year grades. For the unique purpose of this study, an Online Language Learning Attitude Test (OLLAT) has been constructed and distributed to about 7000 learners who were invited to complete this task online. 3516 of these learners took the OLLAT voluntarily and 1783 were successfully completed the test and were included in this study. The findings showed that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between learners’ OLLAT scores and their course success.

Keywords

Attitudes, Online Language Learning, Success

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