Student's Participation in Classroom:What Motivates them to Speak up?

Students are encouraged to actively participate in classroom. Nevertheless, many of them are still reluctant to speak up. This paper discusses the reasons for students to speak up in the class. Discussion is based on focus group interviews conducted on three groups of active students and three groups of passive students identified through a five weeks observation on three classrooms at the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, The National University of Malaysia. The study found that the size of a classroom, personalities of the instructor and students and the perception of peers influenced the students to speak up in class.