The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has affected many areas of human life. It has brought about massive changes to the educational sector as institutions worldwide are forced to close down and students are required to learn from home via online learning. Students were reported to display reluctance and lack of motivation during the online lessons which led to a negative impact on their academic performance during the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the impact of adopting Stephen R.Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on students’ academic performance. The study undertaken consists of a descriptive research whereby questionnaires and average score sheets were used to collect data from fifty- six Junior 1 students of a Chinese Independent Secondary School in Selangor, Malaysia. The findings indicate that adopting the prescribed habits brought about substantial impact on students’ academic performance. It helped to deal with the transitional phase in education sector and students learned to overcome the challenges faced. This in turn helped to improve their attitude towards learning and academic performance. Future researchers will be able to use this paper as a base to assess the effectiveness of adopting Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits in the area of students’ co-curricular activities performance.

In this globalization era, English has progressively become the medium in every aspect of communication, both in local and international surroundings. Hence, there is a request for speakers who can communicate in English productively in every country. Speaking is one of the most fundamental skills in English language education. A lot has been discussed relating to the good language learners, but not much is investigated about the strategies used in a Chinese school in order to further improve and acquire their second language learning skills. Besides that, students differ in proficiency, hence a suitable language learning strategy needs to be identified to enhance their speaking skills. Thus, this paper aims to identify language learning strategies and also to discover the direct or indirect strategies used by ESL students of a Chinese Secondary school in improving speaking skills. This study employed a quantitative design where a questionnaire was used in collecting the data. The survey was conducted among 50 Senior 2 learners in a particular Chinese school. A purposive sampling technique was used to select the students for this study. The results of the study have indicated that the metacognitive approach is the most often utilized language learning strategy among Independent Chinese School students in enhancing speaking skills. Furthermore, the findings and implications in this study may be beneficial to some ESL educators in exploring the effectiveness of utilizing suitable language learning strategies in enhancing speaking skills in the future.