Impact of Problem-based Learning on Students’ Transactional Distance and Reading Comprehension Ability during Covid-19

Transactional distance as an instrumental concept affects the learning process, particularly in distant education. This quasi-experimental study aims to implement problem-based learning (PBL) in EFL online education and investigate its impact on transactional distance and comprehension ability. Two groups of participants from the basic level participated in this study. One participated as an experimental group (N = 40) and the other as a control group (N = 40). The participants’ language proficiency was checked by the Ket English Test (KET). These two groups followed PBL and lecture-based methods respectively. These two groups accomplished pre-testing and post-testing on Transactional Distance Scale (RSTD) by Paul, Swart, Zhang, and MacLeod, (2015) and a reading comprehension test constructed by the researcher. Based on multivariate and one-way analysis of variance, the findings showed that the experimental group had a low level of transactional distance and a high level of comprehension ability. Practitioners should draw their attention to constructivists’ methods of teaching if they want to provoke deep meaningful learning in EFL educational contexts. The results of this study can demonstrate that it is possible to bring about changes in EFL educational settings to promote language learning and class is the main place where the change can occur.