Research On African Students' Chinese Classroom Silence

Silence occurs frequently in people's daily interaction but might block the communication sometimes.Classroom is one of the important social places,where the main interlocutors are teachers and students.Classroom silence is often considered as an absence of interaction between teacher and students,and it goes against the teaching and learning process.Among all the courses,foreign language class is the most typical and representative one that should be paid more attention to,because the frequency of classroom silence occurring in foreign language class is much higher than that in other classes and it has negative influences on the effect of educative results.To teach African(international)students Chinese is one form of foreign language teaching.For those African students who study Chinese in China,Chinese class is their main place to study a new language,and it is also a significant site to make cross-cultural communication.When attending Chinese courses and interacting with Chinese teachers,African students should not only overcome the language barrier,but also try to adapt to Chinese culture.Under this condition,they keep silent sometimes in their Chinese classes.Thus,there is a need to know the current situation of African students' classroom silence in their Chinese classes,to explore and discuss the facts and causes of their classroom silence as well.With the aim of knowing the real situation and reasons of classroom silence in African students' Chinese classes,this research takes 72 college African students who take Chinese as their major at HBUT(Hubei University of Technology)as the subjects.The data and information are collected by quantitative and qualitative methods,including questionnaire survey,classroom observation and interview.Meanwhile,enlightened by Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory,the study tries to analyze and explain African students' silence in their Chinese classes from the perspective of cultural values.This study gets some main findings as follows:Firstly,classroom silence does exist in Chinese classes of African students who are major in Chinese,but the extent of the silence is different.Secondly,the atmosphere of African freshmen is more tedious than that of sophomores,and the freshmen are more inactive in their Chinese classes.Thirdly,cultural factors can affect African students' performance in their Chinese classes.Four dimensions of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory--large power distance,the tendency to collectivism and masculinity,and strong uncertainty avoidance all contribute to their classroom silence.Lastly,based on the above mentioned,some suggestions are provided from the perspective of teacher,student and administrative department,with the aim of enhancing a better cooperation between Chinese teachers and international students.