A Research On Students’ Silent Behavior In College English Classrooms

Silence plays the same important role as parole and passes plenty of implicit information in the human communication.Silence is given a negative meaning entering the college English classrooms from the human communicative field.The research at home and abroad finds that Asian students have a common behavior of oral unresponsiveness and passivity even if they have known the answer in the heart.However,whether the positive silence or the negative silence not only hinders the improvement of students’ communicative ability but also drains the teachers of their teaching enthusiasm.A linear cause-effect generalization on the reasons of students’ silent behavior can’t explain thoroughly the complex nature of the silence phenomenon,so the research uses the Dynamic Systems Theory as a theoretical framework to explain the results in order to answer the following two questions:(1)Does students’ silent behavior widely exist in the College English classrooms?If so,to what extent and in what form does it exist?(2)What factors operating at learner-internal and external environmental levels result in the students’ silent behavior in the College English classrooms?The research is an empirical one combining the quantitative structured observation with the qualitative semi-structured interview.In order to effectively measure the extent of the students’ macro-silence in the English classrooms,a low-inference observation instrument called the Classroom Behavior Recording Table(CBRT)is employed for the task.A total of 2700 minutes of data from the four classes of three different-level universities including the English and non-English major,two courses of Intensive Reading and Linguistics,and three grades of freshmen,sophomores and juniors is collected using a minute-by-minute coding strategy and divided into five groups to make a contrastive analysis which results in the following conclusion:silence phenomenon widely exists in the majority of classrooms in two forms of positive and negative silence and sometimes it is lurked beneath a few students’ active responsiveness and one person’s presentation and performance.To complement the quantitative classroom observation,a semi-structured interview of 10 thousand transcribed words from 13 student interviewees is employed to provide an individual-level analysis of students’ experiences and ideas on the silent behavior which results in the following conclusion from the perspective of DST:the individual’s classroom speech system is pulled by the interrelated and complete-connected attractors of the learner-internal and external environmental factors into a relatively stable attractor state of oral passivity following the non-linear developmental route.The stronger the attractor state is,the more control parameter you need to find to help it out of the attractor state into the repeller state.It’s an instructive sight to give nine suggestions from two aspects of the pedagogical technique and language education planning for the future college English teaching.