Gender Role in Turn-taking: A Case Study of EFL Online Classroom in Higher Education

This study aims at investigating the role of gender in online classroom turn-taking. Since the Covid-19 pandemic turned the traditional classroom into an online interaction, the communication strategy of teaching-learning suddenly moved. The face-to-face classroom activity has twisted into textual computer-mediated communication. This sudden shift also influences EFL students' contact with their teachers and other students. Therefore, the discourse exchange from 4 online higher education classrooms was collected and analyzed to see how gender influences the participants' turn-taking process in an online classroom. The result revealed that the teacher selection occurred more on the teachers' side. However, the female students took more turns compared to the male student. This finding concludes that gender role still becomes one of the fruitful discussions within classroom interaction. In the end, it is hoped that this issue's finding could be an insightful input for the teacher to create more interactive classes for both male and female students.