An Investigation of All Factors Contributing to EFL High School Students’ Reticence in the Classroom: A Socio-cognitive Approach

Abstract

Students’ reticence has been a main source of frustration for EFL teachers. Although it has been a thorny issue that teachers encounter in the classroom, little is known about learners’ reticence in the Moroccan context. Therefore, this dissertation has the intention of investigating some of the factors that contribute to this phenomenon, directly or indirectly, from the point of view of cognitive and cultural capital theory. By adopting a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation explores the interplay between Moroccan EFL learners’ reticence and cognition, on the one hand, and their social class dimensions, on the other, by analyzing a corpus of data gathered by means of a language achievement test, a focus group, and semi-structured interviews. Thus, based on the data gathered via the mixed-methods approach, students’ reticence was found to be the result of the interaction between the micro and macro factors shaping the material world of EFL learners’ lives. Specifically, EFL learners’ reticence was found to interact with a lack of vocabulary, high foreign language speaking anxiety, shyness, fear of peer evaluation, a lack of exposure to English input, and a lack of investment in the target language, on the one hand, and a lack of cultural capital and learner agency, on the other. To help overcome this problem that teachers and learners alike face, some implications for EFL teaching and learning are discussed.