Classroom Environment and EFL Students' Feelings of Alienation: Reflections on Bahcesehir University Setting

Abstract

Teaching and learning languages is not innocuously simple straightforward processes, rather, there exist a plethora of psychosocial and cultural parameters. The complexities and intricacies are noticed in all cognitive, affective and behavioral domains of human intellectual effort for learning and transmitting information. EFL students have shown entirely different psychological and cultural specificities reflecting their particular personality type, ethnic background, emotional status, and culture. This diversity has also been noticed in their different degree of academic success and failure, diverse emotional orientations including their motivation, anxiety, risk taking, self-image, self-confidence, etc. Students' different learning techniques, styles and strategies can lead to successful learning and felicitous discourse with the teachers; conversely, they can experience educational failure, isolation, powerlessness, anomaly, and breakage of proper communication with the teacher. One of the repercussions of the traditional learning environments is lack of the proper interaction and felicitous discourse among the teachers and the students. These affective parameters can be the aftermath of the psychologically destructive state called '' Alienation''. In this study, an attempt was made to decipher the interplay between students' gender, ethnic backgrounds, and cultural specificities and their feelings of alienation at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Keywords: classroom environment, alienation, academic achievement, task engagement