A Study On Negative Reticence In Higher Vocational College English Classroom

Harmer(2000) states that engagement, study and application are the three basic factors of success in foreign language learning, and the learners' active participation is a necessary prerequisite for effective learning. Without the active participation in classes, there's no effective learning. The classroom reticent here means learners are not active to speak or communicate with teachers, and keep reticent on all questions through nonverbal behaviors.Many researchers have done a lot of researches on classroom reticence,but most of them focus on cultural differences between Western and Chinese culture such as individualism versus collectivism, face-loosing problems and so forth.Researches on student's reticence abroad concentrate on its types, the causing factors and the effect of reticence on students and teachers. In contrast,the domestic research on classroom reticence is relatively late, but for a long time we did not attach great importance to researching students' communicative competence. And few people analyze the reasons of classroom reticence systematically from students' perspective and teacher's perspective. Most of the studies are attempted at high school students and English major university students, the studies on higher vocational collegestudents' reticence are relatively few. So this research aims at exploring the reasons of classroom reticence from linguistic factor, psychological factor,cultural factor and other factors on students' aspect and teacher's aspect.This research is based on the output theory, self-efficacy theory and interaction theory and the author conducted a qualitative and quantitative research in which 126 non-English major sophomores from Baotou Vocational and Technical College were chosen as the subjects. In this research,the research questions are as follows:1. To what degree are higher vocational college students reticent in English class?2. What are the contributing factors that lead to students' classroom negative reticence?3. How to reduce reticence in class and to arouse students' motivation and interest in order to improve their English learning?Based on the data collected, the following findings are obtained:1. The degree of classroom reticence is becoming serious, 69.8% of the surveyed higher vocational college students admit they are reticent in their English class.2. The result of the survey showed that those factors such as students' English proficiency and motivation, teachers' strategy of teaching, feedback and relationships between students all have a strong impact on students' reticence in the English class.3. Based on the result, the thesis puts forward some suggestions for reducing reticence in English class: on the teachers' part. Teachers should change their traditional teacher-centered teaching method and give more positive feedback;on the students' part, they should enhance their motivation and self-confidence; on the education situations, they should strengthen the reform of student rating system and pay more attention to the development of their communicative competence.The findings of this study will not only help teachers explore the reasons of classroom reticence in their own English class, but also help teachers,students and education department to reduce English class reticence in higher vocational colleges to achieve effective teaching and effective learning.