THE POTENTIAL DIFFICULTIES IN APPLYING E-LEARNING TO ENGLISH INSTRUCTION AT YEMENI UNIVERSITIES: UNIVERSITY OF LAHEJ AS A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to discover the difficulties that can hinder the application of e-learning to the English instruction within the Yemeni context and more specifically at University of Lahej. The study used a questionnaire administered to 109 EFL learners at University of Lahej, and the results referred that applying e-learning to the English instruction encounters formidable obstacles. Some of them are weak Internet connection, high cost of the Internet, power cut and lack of knowledge about video conferencing tools, let alone there is a number of the learners who do not have the suitable devices to connect to the Internet. Besides, there is a little use of the social media applications to learn English. Accordingly, if e-learning has to be applied to the English instruction, it is recommended to use WhatsApp to share the multimedia messaging content with the learners as it is the most popular application used by them, while it is better to avoid synchronous online learning. Moreover, e-learning should be mixed with face-to-face learning to teach English more interactively, and language labs connected to the Internet should be available to those learners having no suitable devices.