A Study Of High School Students’ Acceptance Of Online English Learning And Its Influencing Factors

The outbreak of the COVID-19 has challenged all walks of life,and the education sector is no exception.Under the emergency circumstances,national schools of all levels took active actions to temporarily replace the traditional face-to-face delivery mode with a fully online one responding to the important deployment in education “Never stop learning”.Online learning is becoming more and more important today,and online learning during COVID-19 is instructive for the post-COVID-19 education reform and the realization of “Education Informationization”.This study focuses on online English learning during COVID-19.398 high school students are studied,aimed at exploring the influencing factors of their acceptance of online English learning and providing ideas for optimizing the online English learning environment and improving students’ online English learning experience.This study uses a survey and interviews for data collection.The questionnaire includes six dimensions,namely social presence,flow,perceived ease of use,perceived usefulness,attitudes towards using,and continuous intention.Interviews are designed to further explore the individual and contextual factors that affect high school students’ acceptance of online English learning.This paper mainly studies the following three questions:1.What is the psychological profile of high school students in online English learning?2.How do psychological factors(i.e.,social presence and flow)affect high school students’ acceptance of online English learning?3.What are the individual and contextual factors that influence high school students’ acceptance of online English learning?The results are as follows:Firstly,according to the descriptive analysis,high school students had a positive attitude towards online English learning.Secondly,in terms of Structural Equation Modeling(SEM),social presence and flow had significantly positive effects on high school students’ acceptance of online English learning,which were mainly mediated by perceived usefulness,perceived ease of use,and attitudes towards using in the original technology acceptance model.Thirdly,thematic analysis showed that although online English learning can relieve foreign language anxiety to a certain extent,still there were many problems,such as the distractive nature of technology,lack of a learning atmosphere,and technical problems,which greatly affected high school students’ online English learning experience.In short,this study is of significance both theoretically and practically.On the one hand,the incorporation of external factors(i.e.,social presence and flow)not only enhances the explanatory power of the original technology acceptance model but also provides insights into research in SLA.On the other hand,this thesis also provides implications for educational policy-makers,teachers,and students.