A Study On The Silence Phenomenon In Intermediate Oral Class Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language Online Based On "Production-Oriented Approach"

In the POA online intermediate Chinese oral teaching,we observed a certain amount of silent behavior among students.Appropriate silent behavior can have a positive effect on students’ ability to organize their language,refine their answers,and improve their expression.However,when students are silent for too long and with high frequency,it may affect the fluency of interaction and the classroom atmosphere.Prior to this,there were fewer studies on discourse in POA Chinese speaking classrooms,and fewer studies on silent behavior.In addition,before the epidemic,POA courses were conducted offline,but now they have to be switched to online,considering that this emerging teaching format may also have some influence on students’ silence.Therefore,we combined these factors and took the students of the online intermediate Chinese speaking D1 advanced class of POA at Beijing Foreign Studies University as the research object,and through classroom observation method and conversation analysis method,combined with teachers’ teaching logs.To understand the current situation and reasons of silent behavior of international students in D1 class,and to give strategies to deal with them.In order to get a detailed picture of the silent behavior of the intermediate Chinese speaking D1 students in POA,we conducted classroom observation for 6 units and 36 class periods,and transcribed the text,totaling 207,909 words.We used the "drive-facilitate process-output process" as a clue to observe the types of students’ silence in each unit,the types and length of students’ silence,the teachers’ questioning style in each unit,and the teachers’ strategies for dealing with silence in each unit.First,in each of the six units studied in this paper,each unit was a six 50-minute online course on spoken Chinese at the intermediate level,the number of silences was in the range of 200 to 300.The number of students’ silent behaviors did not change regularly as the course progressed,proving that the factors influencing students’ silent behaviors are diverse and complex.Among the silent behaviors,the most number of silences were produced between the discourse rounds,and the types of student silences were ranked as silence between the discourse rounds,silence in the discourse rounds,and silence within the discourse rounds,silent behaviors are easily produced in situations where the teacher asks a question and then lets the student answer.In terms of each session:in the driving session,students were prone to inter-turn silence and the turn silence when the driving video was long and difficult.In the facilitation process,students may be less motivated to answer questions when they are under the teacher’s control for a long time,resulting in inter-turn silence and the turn silence.During the output process,when students dominate the classroom,the proportion of within-turn silence is relatively high.The various types of silent behaviors produced by students in each session are related to the topic of the unit content,and students may show more silent behaviors when the topic is more unfamiliar and students are less exposed to it.Second,the percentage of long periods of silence in online courses is slightly higher than in offline courses.Online courses are inevitably affected by network delays,and short periods of silence offline may become long periods of silence when transformed to online,so there are some differences between online and offline courses.From each session,the relationship between the type of silence and the length of silence of students showed different characteristics:in the driving session,the silences within the students’ discourse wheels were all short-lived silences,mainly related to the small volume and short length of students’ output discourse,and the distribution of long and short periods of silence in the students’ discourse wheels in the driving session was more balanced,and the teachers gave students more than enough time to think,which indicated that the teachers’ attitude toward silence was more positive.The students’ difficulty gradually increased during the facilitation process,so the proportion of long periods of silence was slightly lower than that of the driving session and the output process;in the output process,the proportion of students’ long periods of silence was higher than expected,which was mainly related to the way of online teaching.Third,the teacher’s questioning style before the emergence of silent behavior was dominated by demonstrative and reference questions,while the percentage of comprehension check,clarification,and confirmation questions was lower,and rhetorical and expressive questions were used very infrequently.In the classroom observation,we found that these latter types of questions were mostly used as supplementary questioning means to reference and display questions.Looking at the individual sessions:the teachers used a single strategy to deal with silence in the driving session,mostly waiting for students when they were silent and answering until they gave their answers,but also consciously adopting some strategies to actively break the silence.In the facilitation process,teachers still used strategies to wait for students to give their answers,but they used a wider variety of strategies and paid more attention to providing help and support to students while they were answering and preparing for the output.In the output process,students’ output was the main focus,and teachers used fewer strategies to break the silence.Fourth,when confronted with silent behavior,teachers often waited for students to answer until they gave their answers,occasionally repeated the question or part of the question or assigned students to answer,asked other students,or had all students say it together,and rarely waited for students to answer until they signaled to give up or the teacher switched to another question.In terms of the sessions,teachers used a single strategy for dealing with silence in the facilitation sessions,mostly waiting for students when they were silent and answering until they gave their answers,but also consciously adopting some strategies to break the silence on their own initiative.In the facilitation process,teachers still used strategies to wait for students to give their answers,but they used a wider variety of strategies and paid more attention to providing help and support to students while they were answering and preparing for the output.During the output process,student output was dominant,with teachers adopting fewer strategies to break the silence.To validate the data results and add to the findings,we compiled teachers’ teaching logs to validate the above.In this paper,we explore the causes of student silence from three aspects:teachers,students,and teaching environment.The teacher-side factors include the four aspects of teaching delivery style,topic selection,teacher’s questioning style,and classroom management;the teaching environment factors include online environmental issues and overall classroom atmosphere;and the student-side factors include students’language ability and personality and students’ cognitive style.In this regard,we propose strategies to cope with silent behavior,control the length of silence,pay attention to the appropriateness of teaching content and topic selection,pay attention to the teacher’s questioning and feedback skills,and optimize the online speaking teaching format.