The Relationship Between Hall's Context Dimension and Indonesian-Speaking EFL Learners' Participation

Abstract

Classroom interaction is considered to be one of the key factors determining learners' development in learning another language(Allwright and Bailey, 1991). Active participation during classroom interaction is thus expected by the teacher. However, the way learners participate might vary one another because of different communication style they perceive. Hall's categorization of hight and low context dimension (1976) is believed to be one of the factors which influence communication style. This study was thus aimed to identify Indonesian EFL learners' degree of context dimension to find whether it has relation to their participation in class. In this study, 35 English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners of English Departemen, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga, Indonesia, were given 8-items questionnaire adapted from Gudykunst et al. (1996) to identify their degree of context dimension. Classroom observation was conducted to obtain data of learners' participant. Quantitative data from the questionnaire and observation were analyzed using Microsoft Excel program. Spearman correlation coefficient was used to identify the correlation between participants' degree of context dimension and the way they participate in class, and it was found thet there was a significant correlation between learners' degree of cobtext dimension and learners' self-initiated turn (rs=-.57,p.<.01).