A Study Of Silence Phenomenon In English Class Of Senior High School

Silence is a commonly seen phenomenon in daily life and communication. In the process of English learning, especially in senior high school, students always keep silent in class. Most teachers would neglect this silence and they would not want to find a way to solve it. There are many studies on classroom silence at home and abroad, but they are mainly about junior high school students and non-English majors in college. There are few studies on silence phenomenon in senior high schools. So on the basis of input and output theory, cooperative principles and relevance theory, this thesis studies the present situation, causes and effective solutions of classroom silence in senior high school. Observation, questionnaires and interview to collect data are used in this thesis. The result show that silence in senior high school English class is quite serious. There are two kinds of students who would keep silent in class. Some believe that the main purpose in class is to acquire knowledge and interaction is a waste of time. The others totally have no interests in study. Silence is caused by the environment, teachers and students themselves, for example, inadequate teaching resources, the influence of traditional teaching method, teachers’ characteristics and students’ learning goals. Some solutions to the problems can be drawn, that is students learning environment needs to be improved, the influence of college entrance examination should be gotten rid of, the teaching methods need to be improved and students’ learning goal should be cleared.