An investigation of causes of Turkish EFL students' reticence in foreign language classroom

The focus of language teaching has shifted from teaching grammatical structures to teaching the language for communicative purposes over the recent years. In this context, being capable of speaking in a foreign language and being able to use it to meet communicational needs has gained great importance. However, in Turkish EFL context majority of foreign language learners do not participate in speaking activities and prefer to remain reticent. Because they have difficulties in speaking and think that speaking is the most difficult skill to improve. This study aims to investigate what causes language learners' reticence during oral activities in speaking courses, who major ELL. The study also aims to investigate whether participants' gender, grade, first language, reading and watching in English, having overseas experience and having English speaking parents are factors in their reticence. The participants were 257 students who are majoring ELL at Bingöl University. Their grades vary from first grade to fourth grade. A questionnaire consisting two parts was used to collect data. The data were analysed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences 20 (SPSS 20). Eight Subscales were generated with factor analysis to sum up the data. Then, for each subscale a descriptive analysis containing mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values were computed. Lastly, to identify the differences among the groups ANOVA and T-test were administrated. The findings of the study showed that lack of practice and preparation, fear of failure and negative evaluation, fear of speaking in presence of others, lack of overall language proficiency, lack of confidence, fear of making mistakes, physical classroom environment and teacher related factors that cause reticence, respectively. Additionally, it is found that participants' gender, grade, first language, reading and watching in English and having overseas experience are important factors in reticence. Key Words: Reticence, Reticence in Oral activities, Speaking Problems in Classroom