Due to the rapid advancement of the relevant technology and the COVID-19 health pandemic, educational institutions have had to adapt to ongoing and ever-changing circumstances at a very rapid rate. Thus, the Moodle and Microsoft Teams platforms are being used by teachers to more directly teach students, as well as fulfilling its initial role in providing a supplementary tool to maintain, the convention of independent learning. The current study explores the perceptions of a group of Omani students who are currently enrolled in the English Language Center of the University of Sciences and Applied Technology, Salalah campus, (hereafter referred to as UTAS) regarding the new online learning platforms, i.e. Moodle and Microsoft Teams. To this end, a questionnaire was adopted from Rojabi’s (2020) study to measure the perceptions of the students towards both Moodle and Microsoft Teams platforms. A sample of 100 students was randomly selected from the population. The findings of the study have offered some important suggestions on how to improve the existing online platforms and pave the way for further research to be conducted in the same area.

Most teachers in the Gulf would agree that Arab learners struggle more with reading and writing than listening and speaking. One little considered possible influence on this is the particular visual processing requirements of English. This article suggests why visual processing or visual cognition might be a particular difficulty for Arab students reading English. It offers a simple classroom checklist that may assist teachers to notice if visual processing strain could be effecting their student’s attention, motivation and performance.

This study aimed to investigate the most preferred learning styles by Omani EFL students’ and to find out the relationship between the students’ learning style and their gender. 100 students were selected randomly from the four levels in the foundation program at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences. There were 56 females and 44 males. The participants answered the Grasha-Riechmann student learning styles scale. The findings indicated that the dependent learning style was the most preferred learning styles by Omani EFL students. Also, the female students obtained significantly higher mean in collaborative than male students, but in the rest of the learning styles, students were almost the same. The avoidant learning styles was the least favorite learning style by both female and male students. Based on the results, Omani EFL students are more dependent on their teacher and classroom. Moreover, female students tend to collaborate with other students and participate in their different activities and there is no huge difference between female and male students in the other learning styles. The results of this study can help teachers to become more sensitive to the diverse learning styles and it can serve as a guideline to design course content that is more compatible with the students’ styles.