A Study Of Students' Turn-Silence During Turn-Taking In The College English Class

Turn-taking is a main theory of the conversation analysis which was put forward by sociologist Sacks Schegeloff and Jeffeson from 1960s to the early 1970s in the process of researching human being's social exchange. The characteristic of human communication is turn-taking, and the basic model of turn-taking is:"A-B-A-B-A-B". Turn-taking rules provide a basic frame for the organization of oral communication, and people's conversation is restricted to exchanging roles orderly so that people can interact in a conversation. However, daily conversational behavior is a complex process, thus turn-taking is not turned linearly all the time, overlap or silence will appear sometimes. Silence, as a natural phenomenon in the conversational communication, reflects the communicative purpose and psychological cognitive process of the communicators. Linguists define silence with various meanings from different views. However, Levinsion's classification of silence will be employed in this thesis which classifies silence into three types:"Within-turn silence","Inter-turn silence"and"Turn-silence", depending on the location of the silence by applying the turn-taking rules. Turn-silence is the focus of this thesis. In the classroom it refers to the silence when teachers finish the current turn and release the turn by nominating or questioning, however, the students refuse to take the turn. This thesis will start from the"question-answer"model of the adjacency pairs to analyze the turn-silence phenomenon during the turn-taking process in the college English classroom.With turn-taking theory as its theoretical, by analyzing the 82 sophomore students'English classroom of Liaoning Science and Technology University, the writer aims to reveal the meanings and causes of students'turn-silence during the ask-answer process in the college English classroom. Through the analysis of observation and questionnaire, the writer confirmed the existence of turn-silence during the turn-taking process in the college English classroom, and after the analysis of the causes of turn-silence and the meanings behind it, the writer provides some improving methods and implications on how to promote an interactive classroom. The writer hopes that it could help teachers on how to deal with the students'turn-silence in the English classroom through this research.