Emotional Engagement and Digital Interaction in Virtual English Classrooms: Exploring the Mediating Role of Teacher Immediacy

Abstract

Virtual English classes have become very popular very quickly, but it's still hard to keep students mentally linked because being online doesn't always mean being connected. They studied how teaching worry can be used to connect digital contact with emotional participation. The purpose was to find out how cyber-communication can become important to people's feelings. Digital engagement included live talks, chats, platform tasks, and exchanges between teachers and students. teaching timing theory and an online presence, too. Individuals were informed that emotional connection means having fun, being thrilled, calming down, and being ready to participate. A quantitative analytical design used a poll of 420 students who had been taking English lessons online for a long time. Digital touch, how on-time teachers were seen to be teaching, and emotional connection were all scored using standard and context-adjusted methods. We looked at basic screening, measurement proof, reliability assessment, association analysis, structure modeling, and bootstrapped mediation tests. Digital touch, teaching on time, and emotional involvement were all strongly linked to each other. According to structural models, digital contact was a good predictor of both teacher immediacy and emotional engagement. On the other hand, teacher immediacy was a better predictor of emotional engagement. Based on the bootstrapped indirect effect, partial mediation was supported. This means that contact helps with emotional engagement in part because instant teacher conversation makes students feel understood, supported, and emotionally safe. This study adds to the body of research on online English language learning by going beyond platform-use theories and showing that the emotional value of digital involvement relies on how quickly people can interact with each other. The results have important implications for real-life situations because they support emotionally responsive online teaching, prompt feedback, teacher presence, and individual contact in online English classes.