Study on Reticent Students in the ESL Classrooms

Abstract

Students' reticence has long been viewed as a troublesome occurrence in ESL classrooms.Many teachers have expressed their dissatisfaction with their inability to decode hesitant behaviour and devise effective ways for assisting students with such behaviour. When such students do not participate in classroom discussions, they are often accused of not wanting to learn or of not cooperating. These justifications appear to be unsophisticated, biassed, and stereotypical. This study evaluated the extent to which tertiary students majoring in English experience reticence in the classrooms, as well as the underlying determinants of reticence, as part of a larger project on students' reticent behaviour. The Reticence Scale-12 (RS-12) was used to collect data from 78 students, and it measures reticence on six dimensions: anxiety, knowledge, timing, organisation, abilities, and memory. The data show that the students are reticent, and their main issues are affective control and delivery. To understand reticence better in ESL or EFL classrooms, researches which employ both quantitative and qualitative methods should be carried out with more students in different learning contexts.