A structured observation study into L2 classroom silence

Abstract

Although a small number of works (e.g. Li, 2001; Reda, 2009) do assign silence in certain general education contexts a quite positive valuation, student silence in the classroom is more widely perceived to be a serious problem for many educators. As I outlined in Chapter 1, this is particularly so in second language learning contexts, as a large body of literature has illustrated how oral interaction and production of the target language can significantly aid L2 development (e.g. de Bot, 1996; Ellis, 1999; Gass, 1997; Iwashita, 2003; Izumi 2003; Long, 1996; Mackey, 2002; Mackey, Gass & McDonough, 2000; Swain, 2005). Yet the curious fact is that very little research has targeted the issue of silence, particularly within the Japanese university language class setting. The problem I faced prior to embarking on this project was that although there seemed to be tacit agreement amongst many inside (and outside) Japan’s L2 teaching community that learners’ levels of oral production were perhaps not what they should be, reliable empirical evidence proving the existence of classroom silence strangely did not exist. I therefore set about considering how best I could investigate this intangible phenomenon on a large enough scale and decided that some sort of observational approach would be necessary. While it is true that ethnographic approaches (e.g. Agyekum, 2002; Basso, 1990; Philips, 1976) relying on unstructured observation to investigate silence within specific speech communities have been particularly fruitful in producing a rich seam of data, this research paradigm is not ideally suited to investigating general trends of silence.