An Action Research On Extrovert Students’ Silence In English Class In Senior High School

The phenomenon of silence in English class has long been a heat-debated topic for research.In English class interaction,students ‘silence not only hinders the normal teaching process,but also prevents students’ from acquiring knowledge and improving their oral communication ability.Through the previous classroom observation and communication with the students,the author found that classroom silence was widespread in the English class.Some students who are very active after class also tend to keep silent in English class.However,psychological research has shown that extroverts are seen as more active and outgoing in character and are more likely to obtain language knowledge and skills through communication with others.In previous studies,the causes of students’ silence in English class have been studied by many other researchers and they also come up with different solutions to solve this problem,but few attempts have been made to explore the causes of silence in senior English class from the perspective of students’ personality traits and seldom in the way of action research.In order to break through the bottleneck of improving English classroom silence phenomenon,the author was determined to take a deep look into the silence phenomenon in English class on the part of extrovert students,and then adopted task-based approach to break the negative silence phenomenon in English class.The research questions are specified as follows:Question 1: What is the present situation about extrovert students’ classroom silence in senior English class?Question 2: What are the factors leading to extrovert students’ silence in senior English class?Question 3: What can be done to mitigate extrovert students’ silence in English class effectively?The participants of this study are 19 extrovert students chosen from Grade Two,Class 7 of Dongjiang Senior High school.This action research lasted for over three months and both quantitative and qualitative data are used.The research instrumentsinclude interviews,teaching journals,questionnaires and classroom observation.The results show that most extrovert students tend to keep silent in English class.The reasons of extrovert students’ silence in the English class include the influence of classroom teaching(the traditional teaching mode,teachers’ inappropriate questioning strategies),students’ factors(poor spoken English,passive learning habit),and external environmental factors(the depressed classroom atmosphere,the concept of “face-saving”,“be modest and reserved”,“hour the teacher and respect his teaching”).Then the teacher asked the students to rank the three reasons in order of importance.The results indicate that the influence of classroom teaching and students’ factors were the leading factors contributing to extrovert students’ silence.Therefore,the teacher decided to take an action research,combining the characteristics of extrovert students with the application of task-based approach to reduce extrovert students’ silence in English class.The whole intervention was divided into three parts:(1)Presentation activity;(2)Classroom teaching;(3)Individual guidance.The results of the action research indicate that extrovert students’ silence in the English class has been mitigated to a great extent.This action research provides Senior High School English teachers with a different view on the English classroom silence phenomenon and also offers some effective measures to reduce extrovert students’ silence.