Factors Influencing Non-English Major Tertiary Students’ Engagement in Vietnamese EFL Classes: An Investigation

Student engagement plays a vital role in their performance in in-class activities. The importance of student engagement in a foreign language class has been proved in many prior studies. Most of them have mainly focused on students' and teachers’ perceptions towards student engagement in learning English. However, the current paper quantitively analyzed factors affecting student engagement and its correlation between variables. There are two research questions: 1) What factors influence non-English major tertiary students in Vietnamese EFL class; and 2) To what extent do those factors correlate with non-English major students’ engagement in English classrooms? The study’s questionnaire was delivered to 83 non-English major tertiary students studying in a public university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The findings found that motivation made a more significant contribution to student engagement than the three others (e.g., teacher-student interaction, family engagement, and peer support for learning). In this paper, the correlations between student engagement and those factors were found to be significantly positive. Based on the results, the present study’s implication was that teachers and school managers should form a strong relationship with students’ parents to manage their learning process and share education opinions related to boosting student engagement in EFL classrooms. The study also suggested more future research investigating influences of student engagement with different methods to generalize this field.