Chinese College Students' Silence In English Class And Possible Solution

Apparently, silence, the same as speech, is one of the means of human communication. As a widespread social phenomenon, silence conveys a wealth of information and assumes certain communicative functions. However, to interpret the meaning of silence, one can not be close to its truth without analyzing all the surrounding factors. Therefore, research involving silence is related to psychological, cognitive, pragmatic, social, cultural and many other factors, and thus has become the study object of anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics and other research fields (Leech,1983; Levinson and Brown,1987; Jaworski,1993; Kurzon,1995).However, from the general interpersonal communication to the specific communication area-foreign language classroom teaching, silence has become one of the major negative phenomena in this area. It is well known that "a major goal of all English language teaching should be to enable learners to use English effectively and as far as accurately in communication" (Paul and Eric:2002,15). The cooperation and the communication between a teacher and students as well as among students are the key to successful English class. However, the current college English teaching has long been faced with the embarrassing situation of students' passivity and silence in classroom learning. Silence will not only lead to emotional frustration of teachers and students, dull classroom atmosphere and low teaching effectiveness, but also be not conducive to the development of students' comprehensive ability in English, contrary to the nature and the goal of college English teaching reform. The solution to this problem has a decisive significance in terms of both the students and the teachers. Learners' silence in the classroom has been paid much attention by the scholars home and abroad. However, predecessors home and abroad either focus on it from the communicative and cultural point of view, or try to interpret roughly the various reasons behind the students'silence from the aspects of students'anxiety, personality traits, teachers'questioning techniques in the classroom and the traditional culture, and thus put forward the corresponding solutions, but most of the solutions based only on researchers'experiences and impressions are so impressionistic that they are not specific, systematic and sustained in practice and those studies can only give the current classroom teaching some guidance in a very broad and general way, and it is very difficult to prove their feasibility and effectiveness in modern English teaching in the long run. So it is very necessary to find out more effective solutions from the empirical perspective.To solve this knotty and long-standing classroom phenomenon assailing most of the teachers, the primary step is to figure out the major influential factors triggering students'silent performance in college English class and then to try to find that the design and application of various task-based classroom activities is able to effectively eliminate or reduce the negative silence of college students in English classes.Based on the above purposes, this research is to investigate and explore the following questions:(1) To what extent do Chinese students in the college English classroom remain silent?(2) What are the main factors triggering college students'silence in English class?(3) What effect is the design and application of various task-based classroom activities able to achieve for eliminating or reducing the negative silence of college students in English class?This research has adopted the combination of the methods of questionnaire, interviews to both teachers and students, and classroom observation from the multi-perspectives, carrying out a semester of classroom teaching experiment. After obtaining the relevant data of both the experimental class and the control class, the detailed statistical data comparison and analysis are conducted, and ultimately the relevant conclusions are drawn.Based on the questionnaire and the interviews to both teachers and students, it can be explored that students'language proficiency and complicated emotions, and teacher's traditional teaching mode can affect and even result in the students'passive and silent performance in college English class. There are not definite and clear boundaries among these factors for they are intertwined, influencing the students'performance in the classroom. To eliminate or reduce such a universally problematic phenomenon, it is very necessary and responsible for college teachers to stimulate the positive affects of students such as learning interest and motivation and reduce their negative affects like learning anxiety by changing improper teaching mode and creating more opportunities for students to get involved in classroom learning and a positive atmosphere in which they feel motivated to speak. Only a certain amount of language activities in the class can elicit students' speaking and thus help to improve their English speaking ability. Hence, to plan a variety of appropriate activities, to use the diversification of tasks to stimulate students' interests and to enhance students'confidence in learning may be the most direct and operable solutions to students'silence in a short term. Task-based Instruction provides a theoretical basis and practical guidance for teachers to design and carry out the productive classroom activities in virtue of its advanced philosophy and scientific principles to design the tasks. The well-designed classroom tasks are conducive to promoting the language proficiency of non-English major students and developing their communicative competence. Task-based classroom activities lay more stress on the development of students'communicative competence than the traditional classroom activities, and also the tasks are even closer to the language proficiency of Chinese English learners than the tasks advocated by task-based approach. After designing and implementing classroom tasks guided by task-based approach in the experimental class for the whole semester, the data from the questionnaire, interview and classroom observation conducted to both the control class and the experimental class are obtained and analyzed to verify that the design and application of various task-based classroom activities are very effective and feasible to reduce the negative silence of college students in English class.