Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Language is an indispensable tool of communication in daily life. Samovar et al(1998) pointed that information by words was 35% but most of the information wereexpressed by nonverbal communication. There are many professors and scholars havestudied on paralanguage and gave their own explanations about paralanguage.Fernado Poyatos gave a specific definition of paralanguage from the perspective ofcross-culture in 1977, and he pointed out that paralanguage consists of voice qualities,voice modifies, independent utterances and silence. Therefore, in a broad sense,silence is the nonverbal communication, but in a narrow sense, silence isparalanguage.The thesis takes silence as an example and tries to find out the reasons in collegeEnglish teaching. Silence is one of the methods in daily life, because it not only refersto the intermittent or blank period during communication, but also conveys abundantinformation and assumes certain communication functions. Class teaching is also akind of communication and interaction between teachers and students. An effectiveclass is composed of participation, activities and studying. Researchers (e.g. Allwright,1980) suggest that classroom interaction plays an important role in improvingstudents’ language competence and “students who actively participate in the learningprocess learn more than those who do not” (Robert R. Weaver and Jiang Qi, 2017:570), because learning process is not a spectator sport and students’ activeinvolvement in class nurtures critical thinking and facilitates students’ intellectualdevelopment (Smith, 1977). Over the years, a lot of studies at home and abroad havedefined Chinese students as reticent and passives learners affected by the traditionalChinese culture. In their opinion, Chinese teachers in the classroom process a highauthority, and they dominate the entire teaching process, which leads to the Chinesestudents in English class tend to remain silent (Brick, 2017; Erbaugh, 1990, etc.).
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
The research aims to explore to what are the main factors which trigger collegestudents’ silence in English teaching and tries to find out effective solutions to reducethe students' silence during the teaching process.The ultimate goal of English teaching is to enable students to communicateeffectively in English (Paul and Eric, 2017). To achieve the goal, teachers andstudents should find out the reasons of students’ silence together, and then providepossible solutions to deal with the common problem.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 The Definitions and Classifications of Silence
Silence isalways regarded as negative factor, because speech, meaning and intention are alwaysabsent (Michal Ephratt, 2017). Bosacki (2017) claims that different definitions ofsilence from perspectives of social and cultural situations in the following. (1) a signof rejection; (2) fear of social evaluation; (3) a feeling of invisibility; (4) expressingsocial disinterest; (5) intense intellectual engagement. We contend that silence sendsus nonverbal cues concerning the communication situations in which we participate.Different professors and scholars have different opinions on classifications ofsilence. For example, Bruneau thinks that there are three types of silence in humancommunicat，英语论文，英语毕业论文
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