An Investigation Of The Main Factors Contributing To Junior High School Students’ Silence In English Class

Learning is not the process of sheer knowledge transferring from teachers to students, but the process of constructing knowledge by the students. For learners, listening and reading are a process of input, while speaking and writing are a process of output. Only if the balance of input and output be reached, can students’ language abilities improve fully and effectively. Class-interaction is an effective way in output, especially in second language acquisition. However, many studies have found that there are always silent students in class interaction. Silence phenomenon is particularly serious in English class. There are always some students prefer to remain silent, unwilling to take an active participant in class activities. This phenomenon exists in rural middle schools, as well as middle schools in urban areas. Students’ silence can not only hinder the normal process of teaching, but also hamper the establishment of harmonious relationship between teachers and students, which brings many negative effects on teaching. Behind the silence phenomenon, varieties of factors exist. In general, the factors focus on the following aspects:social and cultural aspects, teachers aspects and students aspects. Although the research results give the author much enlightenment, it doesn’t completely solve the author’s confusion, because few comparative studies are made between urban middle schools and rural middle schools. With the implementation of the new curriculum, the teacher’s teaching philosophy has been changed greatly, but still can not break the silence in English class, because they are not concern about the geographical factors. Urban middle schools and rural middle schools face differences in social environments, teachers, subjects, etc. Due to the different class environments and different research subjects, the achievements of previous research are not adequate to explain the phenomenon of middle school students’ silence in English class. This thesis tries to answer the following questions:(1) Are there any differences between urban middle schools and rural middle schools in the factors of silence phenomenon?(2) If there are any differences, what causes them?Yubei Experimental Middle School, which represents urban middle schools, and Wulong Changba Middle School, which represents rural middle schools, are chosen to be the subjects in this thesis, In order to investigate the main factors of junior high school students’silence in English class, research methods such as classroom observations, a questionnaire and interviews are adopted. The findings show that:(l)Silence phenomenon does exist in both urban and rural middle schools. Some common factors like language ability, classroom anxiety, face concept are play a great role in students’silence.(2)By contrast, silence phenomenon is more serious in Wulong Changba Middle School than Yubei Experimental Middle School. Study shows the differences are mainly due to the location of schools, because the Chinese traditional conception that teachers are the authorities of class has more impact on Wulong Changba Middle School, which lies in rural areas.(3)The classroom anxiety has become an important cause of silence in YuBei Experimental Middle School, and face to face interviews show that the student’s anxiety is caused chiefly by high expectations of families and academic pressures. At the same time, the students in YuBei Experimental Middle School care more about their own feelings, which may affect their performances in class, too. As for the junior high school students, their performances in class mainly depend on the degree of recognition of their teachers and teaching plans, so some suggestions are given to the teachers.We conclude that the cause of students’ silence in urban and rural middle schools have their similarities and differences, teachers should attend to the factors causing silence in English class teaching, and take the differences into consideration. They need to update their teaching ideas to lead the class interaction to reach the best results.