Silence In Rural Middle School English Classroom: Causes And Solutions

The New Curriculum emphasizes that teaching is the process of teaching and learning exchanges, interaction, both teacher and student exchanges, mutual communication, mutual inspiration, mutual reinforcing . In this process, teachers and students share their thinking, experience and knowledge, exchange their feelings, experiences and ideas, enrich the teaching content and seek new discoveries so as to achieve a consensus and form a Learning Community so that it can achieve common development of teaching and learning. Also, English teaching is a multi-level, multi-functional, comprehensive use of various sensory activities and it is a two-way process of teaching and learning, which is complex and detailed. The New Curriculum with its new ideas, new teaching methods, and new evaluation system influence and changes the secondary school English teaching. Thus, the classroom atmosphere has also been concerned. It influences and determines the quality of classroom teaching all the time. And the formation of teaching is hindered and the teaching effect is reduced easily by boring classroom atmosphere, however, active classroom atmosphere helps to improve students' English language proficiency and improve the quality of the teaching and learning.Successful English classroom has three basic elements, which are input, learning and use(Harmer,2000). These three factors need the cooperation and participation of students. In the real middle school English class, students speak less and less , silence appears in the classroom frequently, which leads to great difficulties for English language teaching. This phenomenon has seriously affected the English proficiency of students in training and it does not conform to modern English language teaching, which advocates teaching philosophy is that the students are center of the teaching process, teachers should be concerned about the silence in the classroom. Local government and education departments should actively improve the environment for English language teaching and the teachers should also need to improve teaching methods, improve questioning skills and create a relaxing and pleasant atmosphere of the classroom actively so as to alleviate the silence which exists in English teaching. Students are particularly silent in English class because of the limitations of geographical culture and teaching conditions in rural middle school. In this paper, the causes of the current existence of the phenomenon of silence in rural middle school English class are studied through questionnaires, classroom observation, after-school interviews and other research methods. It is found that the causes are related to the characters of the students themselves, their mastering of the basic knowledge of English language as well as the teaching methods and teaching strategies of teachers. Because different students have different reasons to keep silent, the author points out the corresponding measures and teaching recommendations from changing the teaching methods and teaching strategies of teachers in order to change the silence of English classes in rural middle schools and improve teaching quality.