A Tentative Analysis Of The Reasons Of Silence Phenomenon In Senior High School English Class And Its Solutions

In the English classroom of senior middle school, only few students can take part in various activities and express their opinions actively. When teachers put out a question, most of the student tend to keep silent. Students'passive reaction not only prevents the going on of teaching activities but also becomes an obstacle to their English learning. Breaking the classroom silence and inspiring students'enthusiasm of joining in classroom activities will enhance students'language ability in the process of language using, and therefore achieve the goals of English teaching.Many students behave passively in classroom. But according to my investigation, they also think that answering questions in classroom has positive effects on improving academic achievements and in their deep heart they hope that they can join in all kinds of classroom activities. There is an apparent contradiction between the actual performance and inner aspirations. The purpose of this thesis is to find out reasons that lead to this contradiction and therefore work out solutions to break classroom silence and creat a lovely classroom atmosphere.In order to find out the reasons of students'keeping silence in classroom, this thesis made a survey on 315 high school students and analyzed the results from three aspects: external environment, teachers and students themselves. Reasons of external environment that lead to students silence in classroom include: the impact of traditional Chinese culture, dull atmosphere of English classroom and defects of evaluation system. Reasons from teachers include: teaching methods, feedback from teachers and teachers'questioning strategies. Reasons from students are instrumental motivation of learning English, low language ability, peer pressure and the lack of self-confidence.Corresponding to the above reasons, solutions can also be divided into three aspects. First of all, we should create a favorable teaching environment. It is necessary to influence the student with English culture in order to overcome the negative impacts of Chinese culture on students and create a dynamic classroom environment to evoke students'emotions. Secondly, we should enhance the educational concept of English teachers. Only by changing educational concept can teachers fundamentally change their teaching methods and organize classroom activities in a variety of ways so as to inspire students'enthusiasm. Finally, we should improve the language ability of students to help them rebuild self-confidence. In many situations students remain silent in classroom because of their lack of language ability which makes them feel unconfident. Therefore, efforts should be made to improve English proficiency of students, promote the transformation of knowledge to ability and create opportunities for students to experience success in order to help them gain self-confidence.