Students' Reticence In English Classrooms

Communicative teaching approach tells us that language teaching relays heavily on the value of interaction. It attached great importance to keep our learners active in English classroom and increase learner talking time. However, resent literature, mainly done in Hong Kong, shows that Asian students are more apt to keep reticent in English lessons. Nevertheless some Chinese researchers argued that it was merely a myth to claim that the Asian students are reticent. Therefore, the present study attempted to gain an authentic picture of senior high-school English classroom in China with more scientific data collection method to clarify this controversy.The present study was a case study, which involved two classes for about 82 senior-high school students and their teacher. The data were collected to answer the following two questions:1) Does reticence exist in senior high-school English classrooms?2) If so, what might be the potential reason(s)?Observation was employed to gain qualitative data and the researcher video-recorded the whole lessons of one unit and it was then transcribed and analyzed by Flanders Interaction Analysis System. Besides, in order to gain access to the students'inner thought, questionnaires were delivered to the students subsequently. And the questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS. The findings are as follows:1) Through classroom observation the researcher found that teacher talk controlled the whole lesson and reticence did exist in senior-high school English classrooms. Besides most of the students said that they preferred to keep silence in English classroom in the questionnaire.2) Overwhelming majority of the students attribute their reticence in English classroom to the lack of required English proficiency. And the effect of habit also counts heavily in the causes for reticence. Some of them ascribe it to the fear of making mistakes and derision. However, the previous research result, namely, interest in language learning and shyness of the learners which were claimed to be major causes did not in agreement with the present research result. 3) From the perspective of the teachers, waiting time, the influence of traditional grammar -translation method, question type, teacher's feedback and communicative environment were the main causes for reticence in English lessons.The findings of the research indicated that both internal and external reasons are responsible for causing reticence in English lessons. But still, as an English teacher, he\she can employ possible approaches to overcome the bad effects of it.However, due to the limitation of this research, there is still much room for further research regarding the issue.