Investigating the Effect of Gender on 85 ESL DELL UOB Students’ Self-Confidence When Speaking English

Abstract

There are many psychological factors negatively affecting English language learners. This research aims to investigate the psychological factors, negatively affecting 85 ESL, UOB, DELL students’ lack of self-confidence when speaking English with their classmates, especially classmates of the opposite gender, through conducting 2 classroom observations, administering a self-assessed questionnaire, & analyzing data using IMB SPSS. Moreover, the findings of the 2 classroom observations suggest that students lack self-confidence when speaking English with their classmates is negatively affected regardless of their classmates’ gender, whereas, the questionnaire suggest that the students’ self-confidence is negatively affected when speaking English with classmates of the opposite gender which is principally due to psychological factors. Furthermore, the Bivariate Correlation test conducted via IMB SPSS indicateS that the relationship between the student's gender and their self-confidence when speaking English with classmates of the same and/or opposite gender is negative.