Students’ engagement is widely believed to be the single most significant predictor of persistence in learning process. It is generally reflected in active participation such as listening to presentation, expressing opinions, asking questions, and working on assignment. However, the idea of being embarrassed in front of peers and the feeling of being reluctant to disturb others can often be intimidating for many students and might prevent them to ask questions during class discussion. As the consequence, meaningful discussion that is expected to happen during the lesson oftentimes takes another form of side conversation such as whispering, note passing, and text messaging, the so-called backchanneling. In addition to this, the class size has also been generating another problem. The larger the class is, the greater challenges the teachers face to engage students in their learning. To address this issue, this research investigates how TodaysMeet, a digital backchannel chat platform, promotes students engagement in an Indonesian EFL large class and transfers the side conversation to the forefront. A number of 41 college students took part in this single-case study approach. The research data were taken from interviews, classroom observations, and students' task submission. The degree of students’ engagement was measured in 3 types of engagement i.e. emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement. Research findings suggest that the digital backchannel promotes students engagement with learning activity, and enables lecturers to provide immediate feedback on the students understanding over the lesson material.

PurposeThe voice of school principals represents the principals' thoughts and experiences because of their as teachers' evaluator. It provides principals' perception on making sense the teacher evaluation. In qualitative research, voice can provide the truth and meaning of principals' experience in teachers evaluation. Their voices in the qualitative interviews are recorded and transcribed into words (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009 and Charteris and Smardon, 2018). By listening to the voices of principals in five provinces in Indonesia, this study, a qualitative research, intends to explore the principals' sensemaking in teacher evaluation.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted a qualitative approach, as it was principally concerned with capturing participants' direct experiences in their natural setting as both the teachers' evaluator and school leader (Patton, 2002). The qualitative interview and content analysis were used in this study. The qualitative interview is a type of conversation used to explore informants' experiences and interpretations; in this study, the headmaster (Mishler, 1986; Spradley, 1979 in Hatch, 2002). Researchers used the interviews to uncover the structure of meaning used by principals in making sense the policies that determine teacher evaluations and that are used to carry out evaluations within principal's local authority. The implicit structure can be discovered from direct observation, and the qualitative interviews can bring this meaning to the surface (Hatch, 2002). Therefore, by applying the qualitative interviews, it is expected that information or “unique” interpretations from the principal can be obtained (Stake, 2010). Content analysis is a research technique for making valid conclusions from oral texts into a research context. This analysis can provide new insights, improve researchers' understanding of certain phenomena, or inform other practical actions through the use of verbal data collected in the form of answers to open interview questions (Krippendorff, 2004).FindingsThere are three important findings relating to principals' sensemaking of teachers' evaluation; they are teachers' length of service, principals' perceptions of teacher evaluations and consistency in teacher performance improvement. The principals' perception greatly influences their beliefs and sensemaking of teacher evaluation. In essence, teacher evaluation has not been used to identify high-quality teachers. Principals focus more on the improvement of teachers' welfare than teacher actual performance.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should explore principals' attitude toward the stakeholders when student achievement is not in line with the consistent increase in teachers' performance ratings. And, it is also necessary to investigate the policy makers response to see the consistent improvement in teacher's evaluation is not in line with student achievement. Finally, how to eliminate the culture of joint responsibility without causing frictions in the school environment.Originality/valueThe authors hereby declare that this submission is their own work, and to the best of their knowledge, it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material that have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma any other publishers.

Abstract.The main purpose of this study is to improve students" understanding of Highest Common Factor (HCF) and Lowest Common Multiple (LCM). Several alternative teaching strategies were integrated in the Year 7 lessons involving 20 students from one secondary school in Brunei Darussalam. The categories identified in the teaching strategy were the application of group work, embedding real-life problems, using presentations and the traditional drilling practice method. An open-ended survey was disseminated to collate the students" feedback, and among the questions posed was in relation to the different types of lesson activities utilised within each of the teaching strategies. Although 55% of the students preferred the traditional drilling practice on the calculation of HCF and LCM, mainly due to the ease of the task as opposed to activities involving real-life problems, the findings also indicated that most students favour sharing their ideas in a healthy competition learning style between each other or between the groups.

This research aimed to investigate students’ acceptance of online learning during the pandemic by describing factors that sustain their engagement. The importance of this research is that by portraying their engagement in online learning, there would be suggestions for selecting effective strategies. A descriptive method was taken as the research method. A closed-ended e-questionnaire distributed to 263 respondents was employed in collecting data and resulted in 75% response rates. The study concluded that more than 50% of students accepted that online learning was useful, but the technology was not easy to use. Their acceptance of online learning has influenced their engagement in the online learning environment and making them quite resourceful in responding to the practice of online learning during the pandemic. The most engaging factor in sustaining students’ engagement was peer collaboration. Therefore, teamwork, peer-teaching, and peer assessment were among the main activities to sustain online learning engagement. Also, the communities of practice (CoP) could be lecturers’ first choice to sustain students’ engagement in online learning to anticipate the loss of authenticity in the learning context and trade the inexistence of concrete class, supporting facilities, and peers. The CoP could also make the learning context authentic. By implementing the two strategies, effective constructivist online learning should be achieved.

The purpose of this study was to describe the experience of a language learner in an Indonesian student exchange program in Japan aimed to enable students to learn the language and culture directly in their home country. This experience was captured through a descriptive case study conducted to obtain a clear picture of what happened and find out what aspects could cause language concussion; and how the influence of language shock on the social acculturation of language learners. Data were collected through observation and interviews. The results showed that the language shock experienced by the Research Subjects in the target language environment included linguistic aspects at the phonological and morphological levels. Sociolinguistic aspects at the level of the use of a variety of respect. Anxiety also occurs due to the loss of signs and symbols of social relationships commonly known by the Research Subjects. Therefore, cultural differences between Indonesia and Japan should be anticipated so as not to cause difficulties in carrying out social acculturation.