Investigation And Study On The Silent Phenomenon In High School English Classroom

In China, classroom is the main place for English learners to learn and communicate in English. English teachers in senior high schools try to adopt task-based and heuristic teaching methods in classroom, but quite a few students still keep silent without answering or thinking about teachers' questions. Their passive reaction does not only prevent the smooth on-going of teaching activities, but also becomes an obstacle to their English learning progress. Thus, it is an urgent task to help English teachers and learners break the classroom silence, inspire learners' enthusiasm of joining positively in classroom activities and promote teachers' passion for a lively English class. This study, based on the researches about classroom silence from home and abroad and guided by the Interactive Teaching Theory, aims to interpret classroom silence properly, and thus rebuild the active English class atmosphere.The study, adopting the methods of classroom observation, interview and questionnaire, has made a survey on 327 senior high school students and 6 English teachers in Qingdao, aiming to investigate the characteristics, causes and influence of silence in English classroom. The results show that the phenomenon of silence does exist pervasively in English classes of different grades of senior high school. The major causes to students' keeping silence include the following three aspects: the learning environment factors, factors of teachers and students. The learning environmental factors resulting in students' silence are the influence of the traditional Chinese culture and the influence of classroom environment. The teachers' factors come from teacher-student relationship, teachers' teaching style, questioning methods and ways of classroom feedback. The students' factors result from students' characters, learning motivation,language skills and their intrinsic learning style and learning habits. The result of the interview reflects that the phenomenon of classroom silence does not only affect the enthusiasm of teachers,but also has a bad effect on the cultivation of student's self-confidence and the improvement of students' communicative skills. Corresponding to the results, both teachers and students should make great efforts to overcome with the phenomenon of classroom silence, which hinders the smooth going-on of classroom activities. Specifically, English teachers should enhance their awareness of organizing more effective classroom activities. And students should change their passive role of classroom participation, so as to help themselves rebuild self-confidence of English learning.Of course, due to the constraints of time and condition, there, unavoidably, exist some deficiencies in the research. For instance, the validity and reliability of the adapted questionnaireneeds to be further tested in future researches. The causes to the classroom silence in this study are merely investigated around the factors concerning learning environment, teachers and students, which are not quite comprehensive and remain to be explored more deeply in further studies. But, generally speaking, the study has achieved the expected goals, and the results are rather satisfactory, having provided a significant reference and many beneficial suggestions for both English teachers and pedagogical researchers to rebuild the active class atmosphere and improve students' English oral communicative skills.