Types of EFL Students’ Classroom Misbehaviour in a Senior High School

Abstract

Maintaining a positive learning environment and encouraging academic success in EFL classrooms require an understanding of students’ behavior. It is also crucial to consider how different of male and female students might commit different types of misbehavior. Therefore, this research focuses on different students’ misbehaviors committed by different groups of gender students. This study aims to investigate the differences in student misbehavior between male and female students in the Indonesian EFL setting. This research was qualitative with observational design to collect the data. Debreli & Ishanova's (2019) earlier research on student misbehavior served as a framework for the analysis of the data. The finding in this study is that the types of misbehavior are using mobile phones, talking too much, and lacking motivation. Firstly, female students demonstrate a slightly higher ratio of inappropriately using mobile phones during class compared to their male counterparts. Secondly, female students engage in excessive talking, significantly surpassing male students in this behavior, thereby disrupting the learning environment. Lastly, male students exhibit a higher ratio of lacking motivation, often manifesting as sleeping in class, arriving late, and copying during exercises. Moreover, using the mother tongue does not include students' misbehavior in this EFL context because the teacher allows students to use their mother tongue and ask irrelevant questions not found in this study that may affect the passive learning environment. The results of this study suggests that teachers should prepare strategies for handling disruption, create clear standards for classroom procedure.