The students’ participation has been regarded as an essential aspect of education. Therefore, any activities performed in the class must have participation from the students itself. The students’ participation includes verbal and nonverbal. However, this study only researched on verbal participation. This study aims to investigate the lecturers’ strategies used to increase students’ participation and to find out the difficulties faced by lecturers to increase students’ participation. This research used qualitative research as the research design. The data were gathered through interviewing with three female ELED lectures of a private university in Yogyakarta by purposive sampling. In analyzing the data, this research used three types of coding which were open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The first finding in this research was about the lecturers’ strategies to increase students’ participation in the classroom at ELED of a private university in Yogyakarta. The findings were brainstorming, small group discussion, participation point, teacher praise, presentation, calling students’ name, personal approach, and weekly conversation. The second finding was difficulties faced by the lecturers at ELED of a private university in Yogyakarta. The findings were English skill, students’ motivation, choosing a topic, time limitation, students’ preparation, group dynamics.