SILENCE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING: AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTSʹʹ RISK TAKING BEHAVIOR IN AN EFL CLASSROOM

Due to importance of productive skills and shift of focus in English education in Turkey, there is a need for investigating learners’ classroom behavior to find out the ways that lead to better students and better teaching. In particular, significance of risk taking in oral production has been documented in many studies. The present study addresses Turkish students majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and tries to explain and analyze their attitudes toward risk taking and silence in the classroom. In present study, previous studies that examined learners’ classroom participation were closely reviewed in order to explain the inhibiting factors. This study was conducted using a 36-item questionnaire and an interview. All the students at the department of English language teaching (ELT) were surveyed using questionnaire, then, ten students majoring at ELT department we chosen for conducting an interview. The present study concluded that most of the participants are aware of the importance of risk taking and speaking up in the classroom and have positive attitude toward class participation. Teachers’ demanding behavior, anxiety and self-esteem, and ambiguity tolerance were found to be the most inhibiting factors for Turkish EFL students. According to the findings of this study and in order to facilitate the risk taking behavior of the learners in EFL classrooms, we suggest that EFL teachers and administrators should devise tasks that equally engage every learner in classroom, Class participation should be part of student grading system and teachers need to have the knowledge about learner differences and provide students with the knowledge that they are different from each other and have different strategies and ways of learning