EFL students’ reluctance to speak in the classroom — a lesson not learned

A recapitulation of speaker reluctance before and during the pandemic It would be far from true to say the global Covid-19 pandemic is over. Looking at secondary education, however, a number of English teachers must feel that they went full circle: From the ‘usual’ teaching in a classroom to online-lessons, distance learning, some hybrid models and back to the classroom. Looking back at the time before the outbreak of Coronavirus, teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) included various difficulties, students’ reluctance to speak being one of the omnipresent ones. As a ubiquitous problem, teachers invest great amounts of energy into convincing their students to vocally take part in class — rightly so, given the importance of speaking for the students’ development of speaking competence. To build and foster speaking competence, also phrased as communicative ability, verbal student interaction is required in every phase of learning the language. This again relies on positive attitudes towards speaking activities that allow for practice of oral production and reproduction (Szpotowicz 2012, Savaşçı 2013). Despite all efforts, too little student participation appeared to be a recurring problem already before the pandemic (Savaşçı 2013). But when the virus outbreak became a global pandemic and schools switched to online lessons, different studies showed the same pattern: Participation decreased in general and feelings of restraint regarding oral participation grew (Meşe & Sevilen 2021, Bray et al. 2021, Unger et al. 2020)

Communicative competence · Feeling · Foreign language · Mathematics education · Pandemic · Pedagogy · Sociology · Computer Science · Educational Methods and Analysis · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Medicine · Psychology · Second Language Learning and Teaching · Social Psychology

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  Open Access•A Bray, Joanne Banks et al.•Irish Educational Studies•2021

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