Investigating EFL Teachers’ Strategies to Engage Learners in “Conversation” Classes at University Level

الملخص

 Engagement is broadly defined as learners’ involvement in activities that bring about high-quality learning. Educationally speaking, learners’ engagement outlines the degree of attention, curiosity, interest and passion that learners display as they are learning or being taught. Recently, learners’ engagement has been researched quite intensively as it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of knowledge and duly achievement in the field of teaching/learning foreign languages. The current research attends to English as a foreign language university teachers’ use of a set of strategies/techniques to make learners’ do some actions so as to be prepared for engagement in the ongoing teaching/learning activities and exercises related to their “Conversation” classes. It further aims at identifying the actions done by the teachers of “Conversation” themselves to engage learners. Based on the preceding aims, it is hypothesized that the researched sample of teachers does not require learners to do certain actions as preparation for engagement in the relevant learning activities and do not do what is required from them to engage learners in their classes and duly do not enhance learners’ engagement in the different learning activities To validate the hypotheses, a sample of 12 English as a foreign language university teachers (6 males and 6 females) specialized in linguistics and teaching the subject “Conversation” has been given a 43-item questionnaire, prepared by the researchers and validated through distribution to a panel of juries in the first place and then piloted to a number of English as a foreign language university teachers, to state their responses to a five-point scale that ranges from “always’ to “never”. The results show that the sample of teachers ask learners to do a set of actions as preparation for engagement in the relevant learning activities; they also do what is required from them to engage learners and duly enhance their engagement in the different learning activities.