A Study Of Students’Turn-silence In Higher Vocational College English Classroom

Silence, as an important way of non-verbal communication, refers to speechless reaction or pause in conversation or talk. Many researchers on conversation have noticed that silence is an inseparable part of conversation. It’s one of the significant characteristics of natural conversation and has multiple communicative functions. Levinson classifies silence into three types:within-turn silence (pause), inter-turn silence (gaps and lapses) and turn-silence (significant/attributable silence). The last type of silence is the focus of my thesis. In particular, turn-silence in language classroom refers to the phenomenon of students’refusal to take the turn released by the teacher even if the teacher selects them by nomination or questioning.Judged from the form, turn-silence is the symbol of communicative failure. However, the lack of linguistic forms in turn-silence is not equal to concealing communicative intentions. Instead, turn-silence can be interpreted in various ways according to different circumstances and occasions. In language classroom, students’turn-silence, to some extent, offers feedback to teachers. Yet this phenomenon has been so common in higher vocational college English classroom that it has become an obstacle to fluent teaching process and stressed teachers psychologically. Thus analyzing and discussing students’ turn-silence in English classroom from the view of teachers contributes to an effective participation model.Under the guidance of the rule of adjacency pairs, the thesis analyzes all together84students’classroom performance through classroom observation and questionnaires in Hotel Management and Accounting classes of a higher vocational college in Jiangxi Province on the basis of the turn-taking theory, aiming to reveal the attributions and significance of students’turn-silence so as to provide corresponding suggestions for teachers to understand and handle this phenomenon effectively.The study collects data through multi-choice questions on the questionnaire, mainly including the students’responses to the teachers’questions, their self-perception and explanations of their turn-silence. The participants are84sophomores in vocational college with approximately7years of English education and fundamental English competence. The classroom observation allows the researcher to take field notes of the authentic teaching process. At the meantime, tapes are recorded and then transcribed for further analysis. To ensure the objectiveness of the recording, the teachers were informed of the aim of this study to avoid deliberate preparation.The study attributes the phenomenon of students’turn-silence to three factors: teachers’factors, students’factors and socio-cultural factors. As the counter-measures, six suggestions are made in the thesis:improving the art of questioning; increasing the amounts of personal solicitation; giving positive feedback to students; creating a more relaxing learning atmosphere; adopting the cooperative learning method and building students’correct attitudes towards making mistakes.The research aims to offer proper interpretation of students’turn-silence in higher vocational college English classroom and put forward corresponding advice so as to improve students’participation in English study and benefit students in promoting their English competence.