Digital Backchannel: Promoting Students' Engagement in EFL Large Class

Abstract

Students’ engagement is widely believed to be the single most significant predictor of persistence in learning process. It is generally reflected in active participation such as listening to presentation, expressing opinions, asking questions, and working on assignment. However, the idea of being embarrassed in front of peers and the feeling of being reluctant to disturb others can often be intimidating for many students and might prevent them to ask questions during class discussion. As the consequence, meaningful discussion that is expected to happen during the lesson oftentimes takes another form of side conversation such as whispering, note passing, and text messaging, the so-called backchanneling. In addition to this, the class size has also been generating another problem. The larger the class is, the greater challenges the teachers face to engage students in their learning. To address this issue, this research investigates how TodaysMeet, a digital backchannel chat platform, promotes students engagement in an Indonesian EFL large class and transfers the side conversation to the forefront. A number of 41 college students took part in this single-case study approach. The research data were taken from interviews, classroom observations, and students' task submission. The degree of students’ engagement was measured in 3 types of engagement i.e. emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement. Research findings suggest that the digital backchannel promotes students engagement with learning activity, and enables lecturers to provide immediate feedback on the students understanding over the lesson material.

Online backchannel as a formative assessment in improving writing skills

“…An implementation of online backchannel (as a formative assessment) in English writing classrooms had proven a beneficial way for students' writing process. It was in line with what the previous studies had claimed that using online discussion increased the students' engagement (Harunasari & Halim, 2019) and writing skills improvement (Jumariati & Febriyanti, 2020).…”

“…As previous studies mentioned, online backchannel provides benefits to encourage the students' curiosity and interaction for students, especially for higher-level students. A study showed that backchannel was supposed to give engagement between students and their learning (Harunasari & Halim, 2019;Kassner & Cassada, 2017). They already stated that students could use backchannels as a device to engage them with their learning.…”

Teaching with Technology 2020

“…They engage marginalized shy and introverted students by providing a more comfortable mode of communication that is a less threatening way to present ideas (Camiel et al, 2014;Carpenter, 2015;Krishnan & Poleon, 2013;Toledo & Peters, 2010). A digital backchannel chat platform has been shown to promote students' engagement in large English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes by transferring the side conversation to the forefront (Harunasari & Halim, 2019).…”

“…They used these systems as secondary notification channels by which their friends in the group could request an immediate and private comment on their posted homework message, which has been shown to increase engagement in language classes (Harunasari & Halim, 2019). This desire for more notification of any updates to their group comments suggests that these third-party sites were increasing the quantity and quality of the collaborative experiences by reducing the delay between responses allowing more time to think (Toledo & Peters, 2010).…”

University Students’ Acceptance of Online Learning During the Pandemic in Indonesia

“…Accepting or resisting online learning refers to students' perceptions toward usefulness and easiness influencing users' attitudes, intentions and actual behavior to use new technology (Ngampornchai & Adams, 2016). However, either the acceptance or resistance can never be valid without students' engagement which is unarguable the only critical predictor of a sustainable learning process (Harunasari & Halim, 2019).…”