Improving Non-Majored Students’ Fluency in the English Speaking Skill in the Online Environment via Ms-Team

Abstract

Teaching the speaking skill for non-majored students in an online environment with large class size is a challenge for EFL teachers. Therefore, this study aims at exploring English speaking difficulties in the online environment in terms of interaction and concentration in the relationship with the students' speaking fluency. The study involved about 70 non-English majors at Van Lang University in answering a questionnaire. The results revealed that although students were taught the prescribed syllabus of balancing integrated skills, their teachers still had the trend of avoiding (or lessen the time) teaching the speaking skill online. The results further indicated that the learning of speaking online was passive, mostly because of the students' lack of input due to their low level and their lack of interaction with their teacher and peers. Findings are hoped to contribute to a better understanding of non-English majors' speaking fluency difficulties in the online EFL context. Then, a solution of adopting Microsoft Whiteboard, which is already integrated with Microsoft Teams, is suggested to partly help enhance the teacher-students' interaction, the most frequent and typical interaction, as a method to increase the students' fluency when learning online.