Teaching and Learning English Speaking Online with Google Classroom

Since 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many disturbances in education, which enables the superiority of online learning worldwide and also in Vietnam. Among the learning-facilitating applications, Google Classroom has been chosen to serve the e-learning process in Quy Nhon University, yet it is witnessing a controversy over its effectiveness and user satisfaction. This descriptive study aims to investigate the perceptions of lecturers and second-year students majoring in English Teacher Education in terms of its ease of use and usefulness, and the satisfaction of users towards Google Classroom. Also, the research is expected to explore the way they use Google Classroom in teaching and learning English-speaking skill, and the difficulties facing these users while using this application. To achieve these aims, two online surveys using the 5-point Likert scale were distributed to two groups of participants: 7 lecturers teaching speaking online and 74 random sophomores majoring in English Teacher Education. The data collected were analyzed with the assistance of IBM SPSS Statistic 22. Moreover, 3 random online speaking classes were chosen for observation to further investigate the responses from the surveys. The results suggest that most of the lecturers and students have a positive perception of Google Classroom, and they mainly use it as a platform for sharing materials, giving and collecting assignments and delivering feedback. As for the difficulties, not being able to create various practice-speaking activities and make real-time interactions on this application is the most common problem encountered.