An Investigation Into Students’ Silence In College English Classroom Teacher-Student Interaction

The importance of spoken English is highlighted because of China’s economic development and the ever-increasing communications with foreign countries. As it known to all, many domestic and foreign researchers have continuously devoted themselves to improving the students’ spoken English and applied their research to English classroom teaching and classroom interaction. But, according to the investigation, most English teachers have suffered the embarrassment of college students’ silence in English classroom interaction.Certainly, silence is a kind of communication. Silence in English classroom will not only affect the teacher–student’s effective interaction and communication, but also the result of students’ spoken practice. Students need speak more to learn a foreign language well. Similarly, teachers must break the students’ silence to make them participate in the classroom interaction actively. Although the students’ English classroom silence has aroused great attention of researchers and educators, most of their research is based on cross-culture. Among the limited research, the research on English classroom silence is rare. So, this paper intends to study the situation of the students’ silence in English classroom, to find out the causes and to provide implications for college English teaching.By means of questionnaire, interview and classroom observation, this paper conducts a case study of freshmen from Hengshui College so as to provide a reference for breaking silence and optimizing classroom teaching. The results reflect that many aspects cause students’ silence in English classroom: Chinese culture, students’ language proficiency, students’ personality, teaching method, teaching material and students’ learning attitude and motivation.By analyzing the causes of English classroom silence, this paper provides a useful reference for the college English teachers to interpret the students’ classroom silence as well as helps the college students to overcome silence, and improve learning efficiency. Enhancing English teachers’ professional skills, modifying teaching methods, choosing suitable teaching materials, the number of students joining in the classroom interaction will increase seemingly. Learners will be competent in their oral communication in English through interaction, changing learning strategies, participating actively in classroom and by self-learning. In short, from the long run, students will increase their classroom interaction in a certain degree until the present English teaching problems are solved.