Boredom in online foreign language classrooms: Antecedents and solutions from students’ perspective

ABSTRACT

The present study explored the antecedents and potential solutions to boredom in online English classrooms from the perspectives of 105 Thai EFL university students. Guided by a qualitative approach, an open-ended survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The thematic analysis of the data revealed nine antecedents that contributed to students’ boredom in online English classrooms. These included monotonous teaching, difficult content and tasks, lack of interaction, screen fatigue, mode of learning, teacher’s personality trait, input overload, technical issues, and class timing allotment. As for solutions to students’ boredom, the present participants suggested that students’ boredom in an online foreign language classroom can be reduced by promoting innovative teaching, encouraging and motivating students, choosing the right classroom environment, increasing teacher-student interaction, shortening lecture hours, and turning on video cameras. Altogether, this study contributes to the emerging research trend, that is, the aspects of students’ boredom in the foreign language online classroom and concludes with recommendations for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Online learning
• academic boredom
• antecedents of boredom
• solutions to boredom
• English classroom
• EFL context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.