An Investigation On The Factors Influencing Students’ Reticence In Senior High School English Class

The aim of learning a language is for communication and the process of learning a language is also the process of communication. Teaching is a bilateral activity which can be achieved through the interaction between teaching and learning. The New Curriculum Standard emphasizes that the dominant role of students should be fully played and their autonomous learning competence of thinking, discussing, analyzing and problem-solving should be particularly cultivated. During the past few years, students’ classroom performances as an important manifestation of students’ subjective consciousness have been widely focused on. And former researchers have already done lots of exploratory work on English classroom reticence among college students and have made certain achievements. However, this bad phenomenon still widely exists in middle schools, especially at high schools, but relevant researches in this field are inadequate. This shows that it’s of great practical significance and necessity to do researches on high school students’ reticence in English class.For these reasons, this paper tries to explore the reticent factors existing in Nangong Middle School with 143 students from two classes as participants and corresponding solutions to this problem. There are two research questions:(1) What are the major reticent factors in senior high school English classrooms?(2) What measures can be taken to decline the effects of classroom reticence on English study?This survey adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative method is applied to collect data from the questionnaires with descriptive analysis and correlation analysis through EXCEL, intended to summarize the main influencing reticent factors in senior high school English classrooms. The qualitative statistics generalized from classroom observation and interview offer a supplementary explanation for quantitative statistics and solutions to the problem.Results show that this reticent phenomenon in high school English classroom is rather common and serious. These factors are divided into three kinds: teacher-relevant factors, learner-relevant factors and external factors, of which teacher-relevant factors exert the worst impact, followed by the other two. And this finding is agreed with former studies.Based on the above findings, the author finally gets some suggestions through interviews with some students. For teachers, they need to change the traditional teaching mode, improve questioning skills, extend waiting-time and establish appropriate feedback mechanism and equal harmonious Teacher–student Relationship. For students, not only should they improve their English speaking ability, their self-confidence and their interests and motivation in English study, but also they need to develop good learning habits. For external factors, small-size class should be advocated, active class atmosphere should be created and course books should be used flexibly.