Conceptualization of Social Loafing Phenomenon among EFL Students

Abstract

The propensity for students to put in less effort when working in a group than when working alone is known as social loafing. This phenomenon can happen in a variety of contexts, including educational situations like language learning areas. Social laziness may have a detrimental impact on the learning results of students in English language schools. When students are assigned language learning tasks in groups, some may depend on their peers to complete the work or give less than their reasonable share, resulting in a less-than-ideal result for the group as a whole. Lower grades, less motivation, and a decline in linguistic skills can be the results of this.     Social loafing might not be visible when examining group performance as a whole. The only way to start seeing social loafing in environments like the workplace is to look at everyone's individual performance.    In order to preserve objectivity when working in a group, students will merely slack off; this study investigates the occurrence of social loafing in group teams. Teachers can help students learn more, become more motivated, confident, and improve their collaboration skills by decreasing social loafing. To gather information, a questionnaire survey was conducted. 100 students from the English Department at the College of Education for Humanities/University of Diyala made up the sample for the academic year (2022).