EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF SELF-CONFIDENCE ON EFL STUDENTS’ ENGAGEMENT TO SPEAK

Abstract

Students’ engagement has always been the interest of various teachers and researchers. This latter plays an important role in EFL oral classes; it is considered as a measurement of learning quality, students achievement and teachers’ effectiveness. On the other hand, teaching the English language, especially in higher education, requires being motivating and amusing to engage learners with the lesson. Besides, it is well established that student engagement to speak in oral expression courses is influenced by several factors such as self-confidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of self-confidence on students’ engagement to speak. For the sake of rejecting or accepting the hypothesis, which imply that if EFL learners have high self-confidence, their engagement to speak will be enhanced, a questionnaire was administered to thirty (30) first year students of English at Mohamed Kheider of Biskra University. The results obtained from analyzing the accumulated data have supported the idea that students can be highly engaged if they have high self-confidence. Students consider this factor as a very important element in academic growth. Furthermore, the findings revealed that the majority of first year students are confident enough to share their thoughts and ideas in oral sessions and they encounter no difficulties in speaking. Additionally, low self-confidence can prevent learners from participating freely in the given lectures. The results also revealed that teachers’ tasks play a vital role in engaging the learners in the given activities. In nutshell, the gathered results answered the research questions and confirmed the hypothesis.