In the midst of a global pandemic, educational institutions in Vietnam were forced to move all courses online. Under that circumstance, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a conceivable alternative for onsite learning. This paper provides an insight into one specific case study of a university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The study employed a Likert scale survey, open-ended questions, and a semi-structured interview to examine undergraduate students' perspectives and their engagement (N = 255) in the context of ERT amid COVID-19. Our findings illustrated opportunities and obstacles entailing online video-conferencing lessons with multiple modalities in language teaching and learning. The results showed a rather skeptical view towards online language learning due to the lack of studentsstudent and student-instructor interactions. The paper ends with some implications to improve students' engagement in distance teaching and learning context.

This paper investigates the autonomous learning strategies employed by students while participating in extensive reading (ER) and their perception of this method. Semi-structured interviews and autonomy strategies questionnaires are used as research instruments. The 25 participants are freshmen majoring in English. The findings illustrate some favored autonomous strategies that students used, such as summarizing, making inferences, taking notes, and using imagination. It is noticeable that using translation is an uncommon strategy chosen by these participants, which is somewhat unexpected in the Vietnamese context where students prefer it the most. For metacognitive and effective strategies, a sense of responsibility and monitoring received the most attention from the students. This result shows a positive attitude among the students in claiming that their autonomous learning can be enhanced via completing book reports. The findings from the current study provide insights into the implementation of book reports in extensive reading to enhance learner autonomy.