Creating an English-Speaking Community: A Qualitative Case Study of Students’ Experiences of Using English Beyond the Classroom

Abstract

English clubs are widely studied in Indonesian EFL research, yet most existing studies frame such clubs primarily as instruments for producing measurable gains in speaking competence, leaving the social and experiential processes through which an English-speaking community is created comparatively unexamined. This qualitative case study explored students’ experiences of using English beyond the classroom through the English Club of the English Education Study Program, Faculty of Tarbiyah, IAIN Parepare, using Communities of Practice as an interpretive lens. Data were collected through a semi-structured written questionnaire distributed to English Club members; following screening against the study’s inclusion criteria, sixteen of twenty original responses (P1–P16) were retained for reflexive thematic analysis. Findings showed that students experienced English use in the club as a progression from initial nervousness to gradually increasing confidence, facilitated by a relaxed, non-judgmental atmosphere and by learning mediated through peers rather than pursued individually. English use was encouraged by peer support, peer modelling, tutor encouragement, and habitual practice, and discouraged by fear of mistakes, limited vocabulary, classroom-carried evaluation apprehension, and a social concern about being perceived as showing off; language choice was managed through flexible, situation-dependent code-switching. Participation contributed to the creation of an English-speaking community through newcomers’ peripheral participation, internalized shared expectations, and a shared improvement goal sustained by peer and tutor relationships, although the sense of community was not uniformly stable across members or sessions. The study extends the Communities of Practice framework to a student-run, extracurricular English-speaking community within an Islamic higher education context and offers a process-oriented alternative to outcome-oriented framings of English clubs in prior research.