Applying interactive learning activities to enhance EFL tertiary students’ reading comprehension at a local university in Vietnam: Teachers’ beliefs and practice

Tóm tắt

Among various teaching approaches, since the early 1970s when English was widely taught as a core subject, the issue of classroom interaction has attracted the researchers’ attention worldwide. Educational studies in the field of classroom interaction including interactive activities in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) have provided realistic viewpoints about how interactive activities can be employed, and what benefits they bring to EFL teaching and learning. These studies showed that using interactive learning activities in EFL classrooms helped teachers create a successful and exciting environment for teaching and learning, facilitating the students’ involvement in the lesson, establishing and maintaining the social relationships between teachers and students in the classroom environment where the learners can discuss, negotiate and express their ideas through the activities initiated by the teachers. In English reading classes, however, the application of interactive learning approach still remains limited in tertiary contexts. In addition, a modest number of studies has focused on whether teachers’ beliefs and practices of interactive learning activities as scaffolding strategies may help to facilitate EFL tertiary students’ learning reading comprehension skills. This qualitative case study aims to investigate how three teachers perceive and employ interactive learning activities in teaching EFL reading comprehension subjects. A triangulation of research instruments including in-depth interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews were used for collecting data. The significance of the study demonstrates the necessity of applying interactive activities into improving students’ reading motivation and offers a collaborative environment for enhancing students’ reading comprehension skills despite some inconsistencies in teachers’ beliefs and practices.