Online Education: Exploring Factors Affecting High School Students’ Performance in English

Due to the restrictive measures due to COVID-19, all Moscow schools were forced to conduct their lessons in the online space. The rapid and sudden transition to a new environment, for many participants in the educational process, was not easy and devoid of various difficulties and mistakes. These changes have particularly affected such a school subject as "English", since it is quite difficult to correctly create conditions for the synchronous and consistent development of all four types of speech activity (listening, reading, writing, speaking) in an online environment. However, while conducting English lessons online, most teachers began to notice an unusual trend-a change in the educational results of their students. Most often, this was noted in high school students. This trend is that some students showed a sharp improvement in educational results, which did not occur in full-time education, while other students did not show such an improvement (their level of educational results did not change with the change in the format of training), and in some cases, they even showed a decrease. In this regard, the question arises – what influenced the change in the level of educational results among high school students? Why did it grow for some people, but for others it remained unchanged? What factors lead to these changes?