Understanding help-seeking avoidance among efl students and the social climate of efl classrooms in Thailand

Abstract

The important roles of help-seeking avoidance and the social climate of the classroom have been confirmed by research in the past two decades, yet little is known about how these two variables interact with each other. EFL students and classrooms at the university level in Asian countries have also been neglected by preceding research despite their large number and strong presence. On this premise, an investigation was conducted on 427 EFL students (76.6% females, 23.4% males) at a university in Thailand. It explored the patterns of help-seeking avoidance among EFL students and the social climate of EFL classrooms. The results of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) indicated the dimensionality of help-seeking avoidance and the six underlying factors of the social climate of EFL classrooms, with the existence of gender differences. Nonetheless, a direct connection between EFL students’ help-seeking avoidance and the social climate of their EFL classrooms was not identified. It was in the two-model hierarchical regression that the classroom social climate emerged as a significant predictor.