The use of MS Teams in ESP instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic: students’ attitudes towards the e-learning environment

Abstract

With the outbreak of COVID-19, universities worldwide were forced to quickly transition to online emergency teaching in order to secure the well-being of students and teachers. The paper analyses students’ attitudes towards the use of the Microsoft Teams platform in the instruction of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at the Faculty of Technical Sciences Čačak during the winter semester 2020. The study focuses on students’ engagement with e-learning, their motivation, and overall satisfaction with ESP instruction during pandemic conditions. The study was conducted with first-year students of engineering (N=79) using an online survey as an exploratory, qualitative research instrument. The findings of the research revealed that students have positive attitudes towards the use of Microsoft Teams in ESP instruction as the e-learning environment. The results suggest that all the available features of the tool are perceived as beneficial and easy to adapt to, with the recorded sessions of online lectures and online testing rated the most useful segments of the online ESP instruction.