To Leave or not to Leave: Attitudes of the Undergraduates towards Speaking in an Online ESL Classroom

Covid 19 pandemic has affected all sectors in Sri Lanka including education. Online delivery mode was integrated into tertiary education in most of the universities to meet the new challenges. Facilitators of the English as a second language (ESL) classes use effective strategies and platforms to improve English language(L2) proficiency of the students. Improving speaking of the learners in such online ESL classes is challenging. ESL facilitator commonly experienced that some students leave the meeting when they are assigned to do a group activity or a speaking activity. Hence, it is vital to study the attitudes of the students towards speaking in an online class to help them improve speaking. A questionnaire was distributed among the first year, first and second semester students in a non-state university, and one hundred twenty-eight responses were collected. The results of the quantitative data were analysed using the percentages of the responses. As revealed, the main reason to avoid ESL lectures is irregular power cuts. On the other hand, the learners have not clearly identified the importance of L2 speaking. The majority use L2 only for oral exams/ assignments, and some prefer the recording. The decision to leave the online lecture when there are speaking activities is rooted mainly from psychological factors, and then secondly from linguistics factors. With proper guidance the students may change their attitudes towards L2 speaking, and their decision to leave the online lecture would be less. Keywords: Leave, online ESL lectures, Speaking, attitude, factors