A Study On Puyang’s Junior High School Students’ Reticence In English Classes

Class participation should deserve special attention because it has been proved to promote students’ language proficiency. With a growing need for comprehensive competent language users, it is urgent to make students participate in activities in order to promote their spoken English and comprehensive proficiency. English class reticence is very common for students at almost all levels in China. The previous studies revealed that various factors contributed to students’ reticence in view of different contexts and subjects. In this present research, the author chose junior high school students as the sample. It is imperative for researchers to provide practical advice to teachers and students who are troubled by English class reticence.This thesis aims to investigate to what extent the junior high school students experience class reticence, to measure the situations of classroom participation, to explore what types of reticence the students belong to, to identify the factors contributing to class reticence and finally to propose specific and practical suggestions for both teachers and students to cope with class reticence through empirical evidence.In order to achieve the research purpose, 142 students from Puyang No.1 middle school were invited to participate in this study. Issues about students’ participation patterns, the situations and causes for class reticence as well as reducing strategies of class reticence were fully examined. Junior high school student’s participation patterns scale designed by Yu and Zhang(2006) was used to investigate the situations of students’ participation. The self-made questionnaire on the causes for English class reticence, open-ended questions and teacher interview were employed to measure students’ reticence level, to investigate the causes and to find out reduction strategies. Collected data were analyzed with SPSS 17.0.Based on the results of data analysis, a few conclusions can be drawn: 1) Junior high school students have a strong desire to participate in class activities, and the learner factors are the main causes for their reticence. 2) They seldom attribute their silence to their teachers, classroom environments in this research. 3) Foreign language anxiety, self-confidence, personality and language incompetence are the main factors contributing to the students’ reticence. 4) Most of students have passive participation patterns in English class. 5) The frequency of the verbal participation is moderate. In order to change the current situation, the teachers should take some corresponding measures which were applicable to the students.Based on the findings, some suggestions have been proposed at the end of this thesis. 1) The teachers can create a friendly, supportive and non-threatening class learning environment. 2) The teachers can give their students more chance to engage in activities. 3) The teachers can give the students more encouragement and praise. 4) The teachers can try their best to improve students’ language proficiency so that they could feel more confidence.