Abstract:

Class attendance has always been a topical issue, as teachers would like their students to attend as often as possible or even every time a class is taught, while students do not necessarily hold the same view, especially at university level. In fact, many studies have been carried out but have received far from conclusive results, as some of them indicate a strong positive impact of attendance on student grades (e.g. Al-Shammari 2016; Ayodele 2017; Bergin 2019; Fadeleimoula 2018; Gunn 1993; Kauffman et al. 2018; Romer 1993; Senior 2008), whereas others (e.g. Crede et al. 2010; Kauffman et al. 2018) show no such relationship, even though the studies have been done in different fields of study. Research in foreign language-related contexts on this topic is very limited (Hamamcı and Hamamcı 2017). Thus, the study to be described in this presentation focused on student attendance in English as a foreign language classes at upper-intermediate level at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. It was a longitudinal research carried out during 2.5 academic years (five semesters: from spring 2019 till spring 2021) and involved 384 students’ attendance and grades. In passive courses, student attendance is not as important or often has no correlation with grades. Foreign language courses, on the other hand, are active and include active learning methods to practice all the language skills. Thus, this research aimed to find what kind of relationship (if any) there is between attendance of English as a foreign language classes and earned grades. For this reason, student attendance registers were obtained from one teacher who marked attendance manually, and the final course grades were taken from the university electronic system. The final grades were used as an indicator of student performance, since each student received individual grades, not in groups or pairs. Meta-analysis of the mentioned data was used as well. The findings show that attendance may not always be seen as the main or a good predictor of the final grade, and in certain cases student self-efficacy and other factors might be more important.

Keywords:

Attendance, foreign language classroom, final grades.