An Analysis Of Teachers' Strategies For No-response Reinitiation In College English Classes

The existing research on the interactive communication between the teacher and students in the foreign language classroom has been concentrated on the teacher's skills and strategies. However, not much attention has been paid to the issues of why students fail to give a response to the teacher's initiation and how a language teacher adopts strategies to reinitiate students. The present study explored the causes of students' no-response and corresponding teachers' strategies. The research data were collected through classroom observation, interviews and a questionnaire. Results indicated that students' no-response is mainly due to their difficulties in foreign language comprehension and production as well as some affective factors. It also discovered that teachers tend to employ a corresponding type of strategies to solve a particular group of problems, like Ll-based and FL-based strategies for students' difficulties in foreign language comprehension, reduction strategies for foreign language production difficulties, cooperative strategies for students' affective problems.