English for Life Purposes: social withdrawal levels of Iranian high school students with and without language learning experience

In line with Applied ELT (Pishghadam, 2011), English for Life Purposes (ELP) advocates boosting learners life skills along with the enhancement of their language proficiency. In this respect, the present study investigates social withdrawal (anxiety, shyness and depression) levels of Iranian high school students with and without communicative language learning experience. The data was collected from a total of 183 high school students between the ages of 14-18 in two cities in the North West of Iran. The first group (N=96) had communicative and interaction-based language learning experience in private language schools for over three years, while the other one (N=87) had no systematic communicatively-driven language learning experience in private language schools. All participants completed the Cattell’s Anxiety Scale (Cattle, 1957), the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, 1983), and Shyness questionnaire (Samouei, 1994). The results of t-tests revealed meaningful differences in the anxiety, shyness and depression levels leading to meaningful differences in the social withdrawal levels of Iranian high school students with and without language learning experience and its sub-levels through at varying rates. By comparison, this study revealed that school students with language learning experiences in communicative settings enjoy a low rate of social withdrawal.