Exploring EFL teachers’ work engagement and students’ perceptive interaction behaviours in online collaborative teaching

Abstract

The overarching objective of this study was to explore online learning effect of English writing combining teachers’ teaching engagement with perceptive interaction behaviour of students. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) of online teaching and the questionnaire of perceptive interaction behaviours from students were adopted to find the appropriate participants in this study, and finally four teachers with different levels of work engagement (high vs. low) were selected and 100 undergraduates in university with Perceptive Oral Interaction (POI) and Perceptive Written Interaction (PWI) were verified, One-way ANOVA were used to check the homogeneity of variances (p< .05). Through the writing test scores, the two-way ANOVA was conducted to find whether the teachers’ engagement (high vs. low) affects students’ English writing learning, whether the types of perceptive interaction behaviours (POI vs. PWI) affect their English writing learning gains, and whether there is an interaction between teachers’ engagement and types of perceptive interaction behaviours on their English writing learning. The results shows that there is a significant interaction between teacher’s online work engagement and students’ online behavioural perceptive interaction, and students with POI behaviour under the guidance of high work engagement from teachers yield higher learning gains than the other groups. However, the results also shows that students with POI got lower effect than students with PWI when they all met the teachers with low online work engagement, which need to be further studied in the future.