This article explores four Turkish students’perceptions of participation in graduate courses at a U.S. university. Data were collected during one academic semester through in-depth interviews, a focus group interview, classroom observations, and collection of relevant documents. The findings suggest that the participants’ classroom participation experiences were influenced by multiple factors, the major ones being educational factors (e.g., cultural background), environmental factors (e.g., discussion topic), and influence of classroom dynamics (e.g., peer dominance in discussion). These factors, moreover, were intricately interrelated in ways that led to different classroom environments that may be described using a continuum from the most anxiety provoking to the most facilitative.
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