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E-learning has been adopted widely in higher education institutions and has gradually become mainstream in much of contemporary education (Al-Fraihat et al., 2020). It provides users with Internet-based learning management systems (e.g., Moodle) as a powerful medium for learning. This allows students to study without the constraints of time and place and to repeat the learning on specific topics (Sinnott & Xia, 2020; Sahin & Yurdugül, 2020), which has led to many higher education institutions incorporating e-learning in English language courses in recent years (Xu et al., 2020; Lee, 2021). Some studies have asserted that blended learning (e.g., flipped teaching) is more effective than pure online learning using learning management systems (Moradimokhles & Hwang, 2020; Lee, 2021). However, these were small-scale case studies that only examined specific classes. On the contrary, the present study aimed to investigate multivariate relationships leading to the student learning outcomes of a school-wide educational program. In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, blended learning did not work. Conversely, remote emergency education (RME) has been adopted by many higher education institutions. The implementation of e-learning in language learning under emergency circumstances gathering attention (Capone & Lepore, 2021).
Previous studies explored the students’ behavioural intention of using e-learning systems (Granić & Marangunić, 2019), but only a few studies have discussed the effects of e-learning on student learning performance, such as Wongwatkit et al. (2020) and Maqableh et al.’s (2021) works. This study aimed to examine the effect of e-learning on university students’ English language proficiency. Specifically, the researchers explored the relationship between the students’ behavioural intention (BI) toward using the English e-learning system and their learning performance.
Empirical findings have shown that Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) can adequately explain how personal characteristics, social influence, and organizational context affect the students’ attitudes toward e-learning systems and their behavioral intentions through their perceived ease-of-use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) (Moreno et al., 2017). Individuals’ acceptance of e-learning is easily affected by e-learning self-efficacy (ESE), subjective norms (SN) of the surrounding individuals, and system accessibility (SA) (Al-Fraihat et al., 2020). Therefore, such variables were adopted as external variables to establish the extended TAM employed in this study to investigate the effectiveness of using the English e-learning system in a higher education institute.
Moreover, some empirical evidence suggests that students with different levels of proficiency display a different attitude toward pedagogy (Scager et al., 2014; Griffioen et al., 2018). Thus, we aimed to examine whether the impact of such effectiveness differed among students with differing levels of English proficiency.