A Case Study On Low-silent English Classroom In Senior High School

English classroom silence has frustrated many Chinese English teachers for many years. Though this phenomenon has already aroused many researchers’increasing attention, most of their researches are made in a high-silent English classroom context and targeted to analyze silence phenomenon along with providing some encounter strategies, but the studies in low-silent context are hardly found. This thesis is aimed to explore the silence-breaking solutions from a different angle. That’s to say, by studying the low-silent English classroom, the author want to find the factors that contribute to the low silence and highly engagement of the classroom, and then draw some implications to deal with the English classroom silence problem.This study is a case study, the author chosed ti(?)ee low-silent English classes that involved114students and3English teachers. This research is aimed to answer the following two questions:(1) What are the positive factors contribtting to the low-silent English classroom?(2) What pedagogical implications can be drawn from this case study to handle English classroom silence?In this study, the research instruments such as classroom observation, questionnaire and interview are adopted. The following are major research results:The factors contributing to low-silent English classroom:from the teacher’s perspective, teacher’professional ability and personalities have positive effects. Teacher’s good questioning skills and tolerance of students’mistakes guarantee teacher’s effective guidance and students’ participation; teacher’s high empathy ability and the use of humor have great effects on the harmonious relationship between teachers and students. From student’s perspective, the pursuing of a good job, the love of English songs, films and the interests in western cultures shows that students have high English learning motivations. What’s more, the study also shows that the students have a critical attitude to Chinese traditional culture values like "silence is gold""too much talks sink the ship", keep low profile and respect teacher’s authority. Actually, students are eager to show themselves and challenge teacher’authority. From the pedagogical perspective, the language teaching reform and the evolution of research theories triggered the practice change in English classroom; what’s more, the special text book--Headway adopted in this school are welcomed by teachers and students, which also increases students’learning interests.Based on the analyzed results, some pedagogical implications are discussed with the aim of reducing the silence degree in English classroom, such as promote the empathy between teachers and students, have correct attitude to students’ mistakes; improve teacher’s teaching questioning skills; try to use humor in teaching; help students to have correct attitude to Chinese traditional culture values. The author hope that these implications can offer some help to encounter the English classroom silence.