BEYOND DISTANCE: EXPLORING THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF BSED-ENGLISH STUDENTS’ ORAL COMMUNICATION IN HYBRID LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Language Education

The transition to hybrid education has led to a fresh examination of oral communication, a fundamental element for both academic and civic engagement. The research examines how third-year BSEd-English students experience oral communication tasks in blended learning environments, which became widespread due to both the COVID-19 pandemic and digital policy changes. This research employs Moore’s (1993) Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) in conjunction with the Community of Inquiry and Social Cognitive Theory to examine how dialogue, structure, and autonomy impact communicative agency. The research employed qualitative phenomenological methods to collect data through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with purposefully selected students. The analysis of themes reveals that structural weaknesses, combined with psychological challenges and unbalanced curricula, limit students' ability to engage in dialogue and express themselves. Student autonomy functions as both a protective factor and a disengagement factor, which depends on affective conditions, spatial arrangements, and sociolinguistic elements. The research extends TDT theory by adding spatial inequalities and emotional labor to its conceptual framework of transactional distance. The study offers immediate, practical recommendations for blended learning governance, which include learner-centered teaching methods alongside technological fairness and protection against performance-based standardization. The research challenges techno-solutionist perspectives while contributing to discussions about educational fairness, digital pedagogy, and the surveillance and political control of communication spaces. This research positions oral communication as a social and political negotiation space with democratic potential in an era dominated by surveillance capitalism and systemic inequality.

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