The below is the background of the study of a phd dissertation. the topic is "Students’ Resistance to Language Learning in EFL Classes: Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Resistance-Reducing Strategies".

Please revise, expand add extra related information. make it more comprehensive and coherent. Add new references based on APA 7 version. the citations should be after 2015 till now. what you have done should be in line with these questions of the study.

1.	Based on EFL teachers’ perceptions, what underlying factors result in students’ resistance to language learning?
2.	What are the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of students’ resistance to language learning?
3.	Is there any statistically significant difference in teachers’ perceptions of students’ resistance to language learning about their age and teaching experience?
4.	What are some of the major challenges that EFL teachers face in the language classroom as a result of students’ resistance to language learning? 
5.	What type of strategies do Iranian EFL teachers employ to reduce students’ resistance to language learning?

"1.1 Background of the Study
In a given learning environment, student resistance can appear in different passive or active forms. While the former includes overt, aggressive, and observable behaviors, the latter entails avoidance, withdrawal, or covert responses (Kearney & Plax 1992). 
Students may refuse to participate when they are called upon, distract others, put little effort into doing their assignments, or complain about course evaluations (Kearney, Plax, & Burroughs, 1991; Seidel & Tanner, 2013). Studies in foreign language learning have identified students’ resistant behaviors through absenteeism, skipping classes, forgetfulness, absence/restricted responses, uninterested or discourteous behaviors, and physical arrangement (Escandon, 2004; Haung, 2018).
A perusal of student resistance in the literature shows that the term student resistance is almost defined as negative, subversive, and rebellious (Burroughs, Kearney, & Plax, 1989).  In the field of language acquisition, this construct is often seen as a negative factor in the classroom because it can turn the language course into an unimportant educational program that fails to meet the L2 learning objectives (Nguyen, Pickford, & McKenzie, 2016).
Cognitive development requires learners to engage in social activities through interaction (Vygotsky, 1987). Here, interaction is not limited to comprehensible input, but embraces output or language production in authentic situations (Van Lier, 2000). Student resistance can be caused by both teacher and student-associated factors. Students may choose to be resistant to maintaining their personal and cultural identity or their resistance could be related to their inability to perceive the academic discourse of classrooms (White, 2011). 
The concerning point is that teachers in different fields including language learning often hold a negative attitude towards resistant students and misperceive them as language incompetent, destructive, uncooperative, unmotivated, impulsive, and lesson-disruptive learners (Kearney & Plax 1992; Field & Olafsen 1999; Norton &Toohey, 2001; Escandon, 2004). As a result, resistant learners are more likely to feel embarrassed, rejected, and humiliated (Williams, 2006). According to Fogle (2012), misinterpretations associated with resistance to language learning would lead to students’ marginalization, hampering their participation in classroom activities.
Surprisingly, resistance to language learning has received rather scant attention in the field of language teaching (Haung, 2018).  Available studies have mainly focused on the indicators of resistance (i.e., reticence, boredom) (Chen, 1998; Allahyar, 2021). There is a consensus among scholars that the emotional state caused by the indicators has a strong negative impact on learning English among schoolers (Chen, 1998; Allahyar, 2015). Those students who are quiet or resist talking may not maximize their learning opportunities to practice a new language (Allahyar, 2015) and may fall behind their peers (Hue, 2010). Any lack of participation in EFL classrooms along with being silent has been associated with unsuccessful learning (Ellwood & Nakane, 2009; Mariskind, 2013; Nakane, 2006).
In an empirical study on Japanese learners’ resistance to language learning, Escandon (2004) found that resistance was caused by both teacher and student-associated factors. Previous studies in the field of language learning showed that students' resistance to participation in language classroom activities is associated with their ex-learning experience, learning objectives, and their teammates (Nguyen, Pickford, & McKenzie, 2016), their psychology, culture, context and social norms (Tatar, 2005).
Some studies have highlighted the role of teachers and their variables in giving rise to students’ resistance. To name but a few are the lack of opportunities created by teachers for students to get engaged in classroom activities (Nazari & Allahyar, 2012), teacher authority and unequal power relations (White, 2011), demotivating factors (Trang & Baldauf Jr, 2007), discrepancies between teachers’ goals and students’ expectation of the classroom (Jing, 2006), and students' and teachers’ perceptions on what pedagogical practices are most valuable (Little & Saneiers, 1990). A strand of research has associated resistance to cultural alienation (Canagarajah, 1993) and cultural conflict (Hu, 2002). Haung (2018) investigated Taiwanese learners’ resistance to English medium instructions and found that learners’ resistance resulted from non-challenging and irrelevant curriculum designs, non-interactive teaching, and a gap between officials’ discourse and students’ discourse. Besides, the sociocultural factors including educational disciplines and the confucian culture of learning reinforced language learners’ resistance.
It is not easy to overcome students’ resistance to participation in foreign language classes. This is a matter of urgency in an EFL class, where some students may simply refuse to believe that English has superiority over other languages. With this mindset, they might resist English hegemony (Le Ha, 2008) since “some learners might learn the English language to improve their knowledge, while insisting on their own culture” (Canagarajah, 1993, p. 619).
Literature is full of recommendations to use strategies for reducing students’ resistance: it is advised to be an immediate teacher (Burroughs, 2007), give variety to teaching methods and reasoning behind pedagogical choices, be fair to students in the classroom activities (Seidel & Tanner, 2013). Instructors are encouraged to identify, understand, and address students’ concerns about the teaching and learning in a course long before those concerns can grow into full-scale student resistance (Seidel & Tanner, 2013). However, it is not clear to what extent the general recommendations apply to the real context of the classrooms. This necessitates examining how teachers’ perceptions of their use of strategies to reduce resistance relate to their students' responses to English language learning.
Examining resistance to language learning and participation, Trang and Baldauf Jr. (2007), found that teacher-associated factors (their behavior, competence, teaching method, and evaluation system) play the biggest role in demotivating students from language learning. Similarly, Matsuda (2003) argues that in an English classroom with the traditional model of teaching, students can culturally and emotionally detach themselves from the language they are learning. Teachers’ explanations and facilitation strategies can encourage students to participate more in the activity at hand and reduce the levels of distraction (Finelli, J., Nguyen, DeMonbrun, Borrego et al., 2018). Similarly, teachers are recommended to boost learners’ reflection and participation by helping them realize their resistance and guiding them on how to overcome resistance by discovering the sources (Reichert, 2007).
Although of studies have so far highlighted the complexity of this issue and encouraged teachers to provide opportunities for students to be active agents and develop students’ awareness about what is being learned, they suffer from various limitations: first, many studies on language areas are out of date (Ha & Li, 2014) and conducted in the international context in which teachers and students differ in their linguistic and cultural backgrounds (White, 2011; Ha & Li, 2014). Moreover, they have mainly highlighted students’ agency or belief as a source of resistance (Haung, 2018), while teacher and their instructional behaviors are often blamed by students as one of the major sources of resistance (Server, 2018). Finally, the studies have devised remedies limited to addressing the culture and identity issue.
Despite a frequent call for more research on resistance, this gap has been overlooked by some myths about Eastern students’ resistance to English (Ha & Li, 2014). Bao (2014) argues that the complexity related to the nature of resistance has been a reason for the existing gap on this issue and highlights the necessity for more research to fully perceive students’ resistance in different cultures.
Recently researchers have become interested in delving into teachers’ perceptions, particularly about their practice (Nazari & Allahyar, 2012; Allahyar, 2015). From a socio-cultural perspective, individual perception is socially built through interaction with others in a given learning context (Vygotsky, 1998). Accordingly, teachers and students who are members of social and historical collectivities influence teachers’ perceptions. A teacher is a “social agent, rather than a mere mental processing entity that acts on or reacts to stimuli in the teaching environment” (Cross, 2010, p. 437), and the context, which is a cultural-historical element, affecting the teacher's perceptions (Nazari & Allahyar, 2012).
Understanding teachers’ perceptions is of great importance because teachers’ perceptions could provide a lens through which teachers interpret their classroom behavior or make decisions about the classroom and teaching philosophy (Fang, 1996; Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, & Thwaite, 1998). Teachers are bound to misinterpret what they observe based on their wrong or biased perceptions (Rubie-Davies, Hattie, & Hamilton, 2006) or make inappropriate strategies that may decrease students’ initial levels of motivation (Skinner & Belmont, 1993; Pelletier & Vallerand, 1996; Sarrazin, Tessier, Pelletier, Trouilloud, & Chanal, 2006). Teachers are reported to misperceive the academic abilities of learners based on their behaviors (i.e., talkative or quiet) in the classroom (Coplan, Hughes, Bosacki, & Rose-Krasnor, 2011). In other words, there is evidence that teachers mistakenly assume vocal students as active learners (Reda, 2009) and reticent students as less engaged and unmotivated (Dewaele, & Dewaele, 2018) and thus stereotype them in different ways (Ellwood & Nakane, 2009).
The potential bias in teachers’ perceptions of students’ characteristics and abilities is a major concern because such perceptions are linked with the interaction opportunities that teachers provide the students with (Ellwood & Nakane, 2009; Vongsila & Reinders, 2016).  Available studies have documented misconceptions held by teachers about students’ reticence (Kember & Gow, 1991; Marriott, 2004) and shown that quiet students are often ignored by teachers (Evans, 2001). Teacher’s perception generally affects the opportunity distribution to talk among the learners (Ellwood & Nakane, 2009; Hall, 1997), thereby leading to exclusive interaction with specific learners in the class (Mack, 2012). Language teachers’ misperceptions of reticent students were the main reasons why Australian teachers ignored their Japanese students’ learning desires and reinforced their reticence (Ellwood & Nakane, 2009).
Cao (2009) and Donald (2010) found that teachers generally misattribute students’ reticence to their lack of interest in learning or motivation. The data collected through observations have indicated that this misattribution may ultimately work as a filter guiding the teachers to interact differently with students whom they perceive as reticent or not reticent. Some scholars have realized that teachers usually prefer to have interactions with those students whom they believe are more confident and competent in the foreign language rather than those who are not skilled in talking and rarely volunteer to participate in class discussions (Liu, 2001; McNeil, 2010; Xie, 2010; Ellwood & Nakane, 2009; Mack, 2012).
However, some research reports different findings. Jones and Gerig’s (1994) study showed that the teachers’ treatment towards both groups of students in a classroom in the United States was equal.
The concerning point is language teachers may develop a wrong set of attributions to explain student behavior.  They may not only interact with the students differently, but also constantly work towards confirming their perceptions (Allahyar, 2015). Consequently, reticence may become ingrained in these students’ behavior (e.g., Liu, 2001; Ellwood & Nakane, 2009).
Students’ resistance can be reinforced due to differences between teachers' and students’ perceptions (Jing, 2006). Teachers’ perceptions of their use of strategies in response to resistance have been understudied in the language area where classrooms are ‘potential sites of resistance as complex linguistic and cultural ideologies come together and often result in conflict’ (Miller & Zuengler, 2011, p.133). Research has examined how teacher demographics can affect their perceptions of challenging student behaviors (Beaman, Wheldall, & Kemp, 2007).
Friedman (1995) found that male teachers were more concerned about students’ lack of attention, while female teachers perceived students’ disrespect as more challenging. However, Caldarella et al. (2009) found that male and female teachers did only slightly differ.  Analyzing the relationship between teachers’ years of experience and teachers’ perception of how students behave, Kokkinos, Panayiotou & Davazoglou (2004) revealed that years of experience had a significant relationship with the perception of their students. According to Kokkinos et al. (2004) experienced teachers were worried about internalizing a behavior, while novice teachers reported anti-social behavior as a source of concern. The inconsistency of the results in previous studies highlights the necessity for more research to understand if different teacher demographic variables would be a greater risk or protective factor for students’ resistance.
Another issue is that Iranian language teachers are reported to attribute reticence, the manifestation of resistance, to student internal and uncontrollable factors rather than their interactional behavior; this has been reported to explain why they are less inclined to reflect on their interactional patterns or change their perceptions (Allahyar, 2021).
Considering the importance of the mentioned issues, the present study is going to examine the nature of students’ resistance to language learning in EFL classes through the lens of teachers and further explore their practices of resistance-reducing strategies to overcome the problems in this regard. 
"