An Action Research On Students’ Silence In English Class In Junior High Schools

The phenomenon of silence in English class has been a tough problem faced by many English teachers. There are always silent students in class interaction. Students’ silence can’t only hinder the normal process of teaching, but also hamper students’ improvement of oral proficiency and communicative competence. Besides, the phenomenon of silence in English class can also bring many negative effects on teaching.National English Curriculum for Nine-year Compulsory Education(2011) continues to emphasize the importance of the students’ center position and proposes the learning model of practice, experience, participation, cooperation and communication instead of the traditional teacher centered class. Therefore, the study is trying to solve the following issues: Whether there is the phenomenon of silence in English class or not, what causes make students have their phenomenon of silence, whether the strategies can relieve students’ classroom silence.This research will take action research. The process contains finding problems, investigation analysis, formulating action research’s plan and carrying out, and finally collecting and analyzing the data in order to verify the hypothesis and reflecting in time. The author used the questionnaire, interview and the classroom observation to do this research. The research object is the class of 58 students that the author teaches. The time of the research is 18 weeks. The data of the research is analyzed by the statistical software SPSS16.0. The results show: the phenomenon of silence does exist in middle school students’ class and is affected by three dimensions among teachers’ factors, students’ factors and classroom environment factors. The implementation of strategies improved the classroom silence to some extent although the degree of these factors is different. Among them, the strategies for class atmosphere and students’ emotions influenced most and the strategies for learning motivation influenced less.According to the issues above, the author thinks that relieving the classroom silence for middle school students needs the mutual efforts of both teachers and students. First of all, as for students, they should change their past false opinions and incorrect self-understandings and evaluations and increase self-confidence. Secondly, teachers should improve their evaluations and questioning ways, try to build a good relationship with students, design colorful class activities to stimulate students’ interests in learning. Finally, teachers and students should work together to build a relaxing, vivid and harmonious class in order to truly relieve students’ classroom silence efficiently.