Effect Of Teacher Judgments On EFL Learners’ Classroom Participation

Recently, there has been a tendency of disengagement or lower classroom attendance in higher education and the level of participation is decreasing. Meanwhile, students’ participation is considered to be important for learning and achievement, so the corresponding incentive system should be established. Teacher as a guide are regarded as a potential evoking-stimulus and their everyday instructional judgments play an important role in activating students’ classroom participation.The present study had a total number of 30 juniors majored in English education from a University in Xi’an, as participants. Questionnaires, classroom observation and interviews were used to examine effects of teacher judgments on students’ participation. The results suggested that: teacher judgments could promote verbal participation for overall students; the superiority of high-grade groups’ verbal participation over low-grade groups’ verbal participation in responding to teacher judgments was also found in the study, even though no significant difference was showed in students with low-grade group.At the end of the paper, according to the results presented, implications for teachers and higher education have been put forward to increase students’ participation. The research limitations have been noted for which future study can be carried out to avoid.