Silence in English Language Pedagogy: From Research to Practice 1316519864, 9781316519868

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Silence in English Language Pedagogy

Silence in language learning is commonly viewed negatively, with language teachers often struggling to interpret learner silence and identify whether it is part of communication, mental processing, or low engagement. This book addresses silence in language pedagogy from a positive perspective, translating research into practice in order to inform teaching and advocate greater use of positive silence in the classroom. The first half of the book examines the existing research into silence and, the second half provides research-informed practical strategies and classroom tasks. It offers applicable principles for task design that utilises rich resources, which include visual arts, mental representation, poetry, music, and other innovative tools, to allow both silence and speech to express their respective and inter-related roles in learning. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in applied linguistics, TESOL, and language teaching, as well as for language teachers and educators. dat bao is Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. He is editor-inchief of the Journal of Silence Studies in Education. Notable publications include Understanding Silence and Reticence (Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Silence in English Language Pedagogy From Research to Practice Dat Bao Monash University, Victoria

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316519868 DOI: 10.1017/9781009019460 © Dat Bao 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bao, Dat, author. Title: Silence in English language pedagogy : from research to practice / Dat Bao, Monash University, Victoria. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055097 | ISBN 9781316519868 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009011273 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009019460 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English language – Study and teaching – Foreign speakers. | Silence. | Second language acquisition. Classification: LCC PE1128.A2 B313 2023 | DDC 428.0071–dc23/eng/20221205 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055097 ISBN 978-1-316-51986-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables 1 Embracing Silence in Education 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

Why Silence and Pedagogy Need Each Other Silence As an Emerging Theme Early Appeals for Silence in Education The Challenge of Defining Silence Pedagogy in the Face of the Silence Debate The Need to View Silence in Context Structure of the Book Concluding Insights

2 The Presence of Silence in Second Language Acquisition 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Looking beyond the Silent Period Various Attitudes towards Silence in SLA Works Interpreting Views on Silence in SLA Research Current Gaps in SLA Research on Silence Concluding Insights

3 Trends in Silence Research 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10

How Silence Research Evolves Overview of Distinctive Trends in Silence Research Research into the Dynamics of Inner Speech A Quest for the Cause of Silence Counter-Silence Interventions Research into Learner and Teacher Views on Silence Research into Productive Silence Achievements and Weaknesses in Silence Research The Paucity of Research on the Silent Period Concluding Insights

4 Elements That Shape Pedagogy for Silence 4.1 Understanding the Association between Silence and Speech 4.2 Embracing Silence in Pedagogy

page viii ix 1 2 3 5 8 11 13 14 16

17 17 20 24 30 31

33 34 34 36 39 41 44 47 49 50 51

53 53 55 v

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Contents

vi 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

Five Principles of Productive Silence Learner Strategies in Productive Silence A Proposed Model for Classroom Activities Recommendations for Teacher Development Programmes Concluding Insights

5 Problematising Silence 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Rethinking Ways of Inquiry Conceptualising Negative Silence without Prejudice Silence As Cultural Immobility Silence As Subject to Misjudgement Silence As Mind Wandering Silence Out of Context Silence As Resistance to Poor Pedagogy Silence As a Lack of Response Silence That Is Necessary but Absent Silence Arising from Demotivational Dilemmas Concluding Insights

6 Ways of Addressing Classroom Silence 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Silence As a Struggle with Oneself Silence As a Struggle with the Past Silence As a Struggle with the Present A Rewarding System That Works with Pragmatic Learners A Humanistic System That Works with Reflective Learners A Preparative System to Minimise the Occurrence of Negative Silence 6.7 Eight Dimensions of Support for Undesirable Silence 6.8 Concluding Insights

7 Online Silence 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8

Identifying the Concept Scholarly Attitudes towards Online Silence Some Challenging Characteristics of Online Learning Dimensions of Online Learning Experiences Two Directions of Online Silence Painful Online Silence Helpful Online Silence Concluding Insights

8 Coping with Undesirable Online Silence 8.1 The Challenging Nature of Online Learning 8.2 Ways of Coping with Painful Silence 8.3 Concluding Insights

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57 63 68 71 72

74 74 74 75 77 79 80 81 82 83 85 86

87 89 90 92 96 97 97 98 103

105 106 107 110 116 116 118 122 127

129 129 131 138

Contents

9 Silence in ELT Task Design 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13

Why Silence in Tasks The Unexplored Relationship between Task Design and Silence A Journey to Explore Silence in Tasks Study 1: Identifying Task Types in ELT Course Materials Study 2: Learner Responses to Language Tasks in Australia Study 3: Indonesian and Filipino Students Responding to Language Tasks Study 4: Cross-Case Analysis Study 5: Exploring the Distribution of Task Type in a Coursebook Examples of Tasks Requiring More Silence Than Speech Examples of Tasks Requiring More Speech Than Silence Examples of Tasks Involving Both Silence and Speech Recommended Tasks for Creative Silence Concluding Insights

10 Some Ideas for Silence Research 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6

Established Themes Evolving Themes Inactive Themes Under-Explored Themes Connecting Silence Research with the Teaching Profession Concluding Insights

References Index

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140 140 140 143 145 148 149 151 155 157 158 160 160 173

175 175 176 183 186 193 194

196 242

Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 10.1

A screenshot from an ERIC database search of the keyword ‘silence’ The evolvement of silence research (1970s–2020s) The continuum of thought and speech Some functions of inner speech Dimensions of learner silence Two types of classroom experiments The iceberg of learner silence Tasks for investigating productive silence The productive silence wheel The multiple functions of productive silence Conditions for productive silence A model for productive-silence activities The dimensions of learner struggle with silence A cycle of teacher and learner mutual influence Examples of teacher and learner mutual thoughts Support provided for learners’ verbal participation The conceptualisation of online silence Dimensions of online learning experiences A task-type pyramid ‘If I was a robot’. Source: Funny Junk website ‘If I was a robot’ template ‘If I was a cat’ ‘If I was a witch’ The distribution of research impact in silence studies

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page 2 35 37 38 40 44 45 47 57 59 60 69 89 96 96 99 108 117 154 167 168 169 170 176

Tables

2.1 7.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6

The distribution of understandings of silence in SLA books Types of online silence Common task types in language learning Differing responses to fluency tasks One hundred and forty-seven cognitive tasks Sixty-six fluency tasks Comparing two task types A task introduced by Maley (2018, p. 46)

page 21 118 146 152 156 156 156 163

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1

Embracing Silence in Education

Silence is a belittled construct. For many years, more scholars have suspected and denied silence than have embraced and understood it. During a conference, when I recommended establishing an academic journal devoted to silence research, one hand raised: ‘Why devote a whole journal to a negative theme?’ Believe it or not, a search in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database of two concepts such as ‘verbal participation in education’ and ‘silence in education’ over the past five years reveals a glaring contrast in the number of outputs. While the former shows 13,136 results, the latter identifies only 281 items (Figure 1.1). Within this search, while the use of speech in teaching and learning returns 4,242 publications, the emphasis on silent reflection reveals the humble number of 72 publications during these five years. Such an unassertive distribution of silence in educational literature suggests that silence is something to be toned down and repaired rather than maintained and nurtured. In many intellectual beliefs, silence represents backward classroom behaviour. Petress (2001), for example, reasons that those who do not actively speak out during classroom processes ‘are acting unethically’ because ‘silence impedes student learning’ (p. 104). Although such views make up the dominant discourse on silence, some scholars think differently. Caranfa (2004), for example, argues that ‘silence is the very foundation of learning’ (p. 211). When a field involves controversial ideas and conflicting theories, perhaps that field needs more exploration and lucidity. This overview of the book begins by recommending the inclusion of silence in pedagogy to advance it. As an explanatory entrance to the work, the discussion responds to burning questions, including why silence-inclusive pedagogy is needed and why it remains an underdeveloped area in the field, how silence has historically emerged as a theme and when silence research commenced, what makes silence such a debatable construct in language education, what complications have hindered collective scholarly efforts to consider silence in pedagogy, and, finally, how the book is structured to present what it promises. 1

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Embracing Silence in Education

Figure 1.1 A screenshot from an ERIC database search of the keyword ‘silence’ Source: Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)

1.1

Why Silence and Pedagogy Need Each Other

The title of this book, Silence in English Language Pedagogy, captures both imagination and reality – imagination because silence has yet to be a wellestablished component in pedagogy, at least until now; reality because the appeal for utilising the presence of silence in classroom teaching has been ongoing in the field over the past five decades. Indeed, the 1970s saw early requests for silence to enter education research (Johannesen, 1974; Clair, 1998) with minimal responses for three decades after the appeal. Up until the 1990s, such ideology was still met with negligence when scholars such as Jaworski (1993) put forward the idea that teaching practices should consider learner performance beyond the spoken word; when Stables (1995) commented on how students were suffering from insufficient thinking time in the classroom; and when MacKinnon (1999) disagreed with teachers who measure learner success versus failure based on verbal articulation versus quietness. Recently, there has been a consensus that silence remains an under-theorised and underresearched theme in education (Armstrong, 2007a). It was not until the 2000s that the field began to witness early research efforts to bring justice to this longneglected theme in language education. This emerging history of silence research will be comprehensively explored in Chapter 3. To attempt innovating pedagogy, the book concentrates on the process of silence rather than on the moment when silence occurs, that is, dealing more with its in-depth dynamics than its ultimate cause. Furthermore, the work does not solely promote silence as a positive learning construct but depending on the context of discussion also recognises it as an unhelpful condition that requires

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1.2 Silence As an Emerging Theme

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change. Refraining from the judgement of whether silence or speech should take priority as the finest classroom behaviour, the work argues that some forms of learning are more compatible with silence than speech. Others seem more attuned to speech than silence while many can be prone to alternation between both modes. There is a fresh expanse of empirical research that confirms this multifaceted understanding (King & Harumi, 2020; Bao, 2020b). These areas will be revisited in Chapter 9 with concrete examples of task types being connected with more or less verbal ways of learning. For a long time, many researchers have made efforts to exclude silence from pedagogy, as if without silence teaching would go on more efficiently. Some studies, such as those reported by Canary and MacGregor (2008) and Smith et al. (2005), rest upon the belief that learners’ silent behaviour is a mistake in the first place. Silence has often been perceived as low-level learning and a form of disability (Smith et al., 2005). Starting with this presumption, such projects propose instructional therapy to make everybody speak up regardless of why learners are silent and whether their silence plays a role in learning. This research stance, which will be discussed in Chapter 3, represents a major resistance to the integration of silence in teaching methodology. Ironically, while many scholars are trying to eliminate silence, in every classroom silence continues to exist even when talk occurs. Teachers continue to struggle with interpreting learner silence, being unable to decide whether it is part of communication, mental processing, or low engagement. Up until the 1990s, our inability to decode the meaning of learner silence restrained the evolvement of silence-inclusive pedagogy and reduced it to an unrealistic ambition in education. To be hindered by such a challenge, nevertheless, does not have to discourage English Language Teaching (ELT) educators from trying to utilise knowledge of silence in improving teaching. In many cases, it is the passion for improving the status quo that will defeat the fear of impossibility. Silence needs pedagogy as much as pedagogy needs silence. It needs pedagogy because, every day, numerous reflective learners around the world are failing to be accounted for in lesson planning and their strengths go neglected in the classroom (Jaworski, 1993; MacKinnon, 1999; Caranfa, 2004). Pedagogy needs silence because, without a proper understanding of how soundless learning works, teachers cannot respond to student learning with the right expertise. The dynamics between silence, talk, and pedagogy are so complex that, sooner or later, they must be addressed for pedagogy to move forward with compassion and accountability. 1.2

Silence As an Emerging Theme

Compared with research into other non-verbal constructs in ELT, silence research is a late-developed sibling, evolving decades after its counterparts. For example, research into learning motivation began in the early 1940s

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(Weiner, 1990), emotional expressions in the 1950s (Dunning, 1971), language teacher identity in the 1960s (Cheung, Ben Said & Park, 2015), non-verbal communication in the 1970s (Weiner, 1990), authenticity in language teaching in the 1980s (Gilmore, 2007), and consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1990s (Gilakjani & Ahmadi, 2011); it was not until the 2000s that silence as a learning paradigm attracted scholarly research efforts (Gibson, 2006). Before that, research on silence in education had been very much one-sided and discriminatory, painting a distorted picture that connected silence with special needs and remedial treatment. In public discourse, to this day, the silence theme does not seem to enjoy a positive presence in mass media and everyday conversations alike. In most available online resources, inspiring speakers with high expertise either show little interest in silence or perceive it as a harmful phenomenon. For instance, if one browses through a popular talk-video website such as TED: Ideas Worth Spreading and types ‘silence’ into the search engine, out of the first 100 results that come up, only ten mention silence, including: The danger of silence Break silence for suicide attempt survivors My 17-year vow of silence Ways of transmuting sound and silence Let’s end silence around suicide Let’s end silence around abuse Sound of forgiveness Someone forgets to silence their cell phone Hope or motivation hidden in one’s heart Silence-inspired design

Out of these, only two seem optimistic, that is, silence inspiration in design and silence as hope; three remain neutral, that is, silence in performing arts, forgiving, and good behaviour. The remaining six talks connect silence with problems such as danger, suicide, restraints, and abuse. If one continues to search for the next 100 and beyond, still not a single speaker connects silence with education. Out of 200 thoughtful ideas that are worth spreading, none states the function of silence as a tool for learning or thinking. This observation denotes the widespread caution around silence as a sensitive theme in public discourse and interest. In educational discourse, silence rarely has a respected reputation either. Sometimes, I overhear a teacher praise their silent students: ‘My class is very quiet but they are hardworking.’ This compliment happens to imply that it is more common to see hardworking verbal students, but this time good virtue also applies to a quiet group. This reminds me of what a neighbour of mine, when I was living in the United States, once said: ‘I’m proud to see many Black students going to Harvard.’ This seems to suggest that, in my neighbour’s

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1.3 Early Appeals for Silence in Education

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thinking, normally only white students are considered qualified to go there. These comments, which tend to occur only in casual conversations when people speak their minds, are indeed found in scholarly writing as well. One such example is data discussion from a research project which states that the ‘silent students [in the study] are, despite their silence, quite intellectually active’ (Obenland, Munson & Hutchinson, 2020, p. 256). In the researcher’s mind, typically they are not. In English language education, likewise, there has been more in pedagogy that cherishes the spontaneous conversationalist and less in it that cultivates the quiet mind. Suppose we do not feel particularly convinced by this observation. Clear evidence for it can be obtained in almost every pedagogy book: if we open a book on the computer screen and perform a word search on the computer keyboard (by Ctrl+F or Command+F) to look for ‘talk’ and ‘silence’ respectively, the outcome will demonstrate the high-frequency appearance of the former and low frequency, or ‘no result’, of the latter. In many cases, when the word ‘silence’ or ‘silent’ is found, it might come with comments such as: ‘Silent students are uninvolved students who are certainly not contributing to the learning of others and may not be contributing to their own learning’ (Smith et al., 2005, p. 9). Such insights signify patronising research that treats silence as inferior and in need of help. By and large, many empirical projects were, in the first place, rooted in the researcher’s disapproval of silence. These studies do not view speech and silence with an open mind but are designed to prioritise the former over the latter. This standpoint seems to contradict research methodology courses at universities in which lecturers often advise students to be detached from their assumptions in designing research projects. We ask students to stay truthful to non-biased realities irrespective of our egoistic thinking and professional habits. We teach students that ethical research should unfold new ways of seeing the world rather than consolidate pre-existing conceptualisation. Eventually, it should not matter whether silence is seen as golden or deadly; it is down to the integrity of the researcher to explore and present discoveries that please or surprise them as true in context, regardless of what they would prefer to see. 1.3

Early Appeals for Silence in Education

Although scholars in the 1940s began to disturb the idea that silence was being treated as the mere absence of speech (see, for example, Picard, 1948/1952; Baker, 1955), it was not until the 1970s that awareness of the diverse roles of silence became more visible in the discourse (Bao, 2014). Silence evolved into an important theme in the literature of anthropology, psycholinguistics, and communication with the works of Basso (1970), Bruneau (1973), Noelle-Neumann

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Embracing Silence in Education

(1974), and Johannesen (1974), among others that provided insights into the complex meanings of silence and appealed for further research commitment. In one early conceptualisation, silence is classified into three forms, namely psycholinguistic silence, interactive silence, and sociocultural silence (Bruneau, 1973). Psycholinguistic silence refers to hesitation or discontinuity of speech to convey supplementary meanings in speech and to assist the decoding process, very much in the same way as punctuation functions in writing. Interactive silence is employed to acquire attention, reflection, interpretation, and judgement from others, to provide space for thinking, responses, or appreciation, and even to establish or prevent further development of a relationship. If exercised properly, this type of silence can serve as a learning tool. Sociocultural silence is part of the cultural patterns of communication within a society that can be highly valued and, depending on their contexts of use, might have various communicative functions such as demonstrating acceptance, faith, respect, protest, power, and other social attitudes. The 1980s continued to see increasing awareness of silence as being shaped by a multiplicity of meanings in speech communication (Tannen & SavilleTroike, 1985), including, for example, a statement of refusal to communicate (Wardhaugh, 1985) or a form of control and resistance in classroom settings (Gilmore, 1985). Despite such attentiveness, for three decades, from the 1970s to the 1990s, few empirical studies addressed the function of silence in communication (Johannesen, 1974; Clair, 1998). During these years, the occasional appeal for empirical investigation into the function of silence in educational realities frequently fell into oblivion. In recent literature, the concept of learner silence does not necessarily refer to complete quietness but loosely denotes minimal talk during classroom discussion (Remedios, Clark & Hawthorne, 2008). In societies where silence is valued, it is viewed as equally significant to speaking as it provides space for reflection on the communicated word (Zembylas & Michaelides, 2004). It also serves as an indication of respect, harmony, ‘attentive listening and active thinking’ (Liu, 2002, p. 48). In many cases, silence even functions as a form of talk. If talk is sometimes referred to as externalised speech (Ridgway, 2009, p. 49) or interactive speech (Saito, 1992), silence can be the space for articulatory rehearsal mechanism, internalised speech (Ridgway, 2009, p. 49), subvocal articulation (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989), and internalisation of speech patterns (Mitchell & Myles, 1998). Scholarly efforts have been made to look at silence and talk in more complex ways than simply treating them as sound and muteness. Dealing with silence in education is dealing with a complex assortment of voices. There has also been a recent effort to interact with the discourse before silence research was conducted. For example, silence has recently been classified into multiple manners and purposes, including confirmation, discussion, debate, social

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1.3 Early Appeals for Silence in Education

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chat, lecture, negotiation, critique, inquiry, negation, and so on. As much as talk can fall into meaningful talk, irrelevant talk, high-quality talk, and low-quality talk (Edwards & Westgate, 1987), there can be meaningful, irrelevant, and multiple-quality silence. If standard or normal, accepted classroom talk is sometimes defined as ‘the speech of educated people’ (Edwards & Westgate, 1987, p. 28), then standard or normal, accepted classroom silence can also be defined as the silence of educated people. Scholarly appeals for taking silence into account in education have been an enduring request for seventy years now. However, only the past two decades truly witnessed responsive research efforts. If most appeals during the 1950s– 1990s asked for a consideration of the overall study of silence as a meaningmaking mechanism (Picard, 1948/1952, 1963; Scott, 1972; Dauenhauer, 1980; Kalamaras, 1994; Clair, 1998), the yearning for silence research since the 2000s has become increasingly concrete through tangible suggestions for investigating specific areas of pedagogy. In particular, the teacher’s role in how learners employ silence in learning has received more emphasis (Harumi, 2011). Other requests have been made for researchers to inspect teacher management of turn-taking experiences (Wong & Waring, 2012; Ingram & Elliott, 2015; Karas, 2017), teachers’ practice of silence (Vassilopoulos & Konstantinidis, 2012; Bao, 2014, 2020b), teacher tendency to fill in the silent gap (Walsh, 2011), learner proficiency (Hosoda, 2014), various of types of productive silences (Ollin, 2008), teacher ability to deal with dilemmas (Harumi, 2020), silence as a process of interaction rather than outcome (Gardner, 2007; E. L. Lee, 2007), space for learning (Walsh & Li, 2013), elicitation strategies (Harumi, 2020), the role of interaction modelling (King et al., 2020), peer exclusion (Bao, 2020b), question types (Smith & King, 2017), learner preferences (Bao, 2020b), and cultural expectations (Nakane, 2005; Bao, 2020b; Harumi, 2020), among other factors which might influence the presence and nature of silence. The dynamics of these factors represent endless promising possibilities. Many of them have been minimally responded to in scholarly research efforts while, debatably, other potential factors remain unknown and have yet to be discovered. Despite the above gaps, many achievements have taken place in the quest for a more profound understanding of silence. Recent contributions to researchbased knowledge include the facilitative role of silence in learning (Li, 2001; Granger, 2004; Reda, 2009), the consideration of misperceived silence in communication (Fujio, 2004; Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012), the reinterpretation of silent behaviour in multicultural contexts (Harumi, 1999; Nakane, 2007), the dynamics of frustration with silence in intercultural communication (King, 2016; Verouden & Van der Sanden, 2018; Morris & King, 2018), the process of negotiating multiple identities (Morita, 2004), the range of meanings decoded in silent experiences (Harumi, 2011; King, 2013a, 2013b; Bao, 2014),

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and the modifiability of learner behaviour (Zhang & Head, 2010; Talandis & Stout, 2015; Yashima, Ikeda & Nakahira, 2016). This list will be expanded in Chapter 3 of the book with qualitative elaborations. 1.4

The Challenge of Defining Silence

The conceptualisation of silence ranks among the most mysterious areas of all the non-verbal constructs in ELT. After all the debate and controversy relating to the construct (as will be reviewed in this chapter and comprehensively unpacked in Chapters 2 and 3), it seems impossible to capture silence in any one adequate definition. This is because silence is fluid and can only have comparative, rather than absolute, meanings. Although the literal sense of this concept signifies the absence or inaudibility of sound or words, researchers for a long time have realised that the broader sense of silence does include sound and words in it. For instance, while one person is keeping quiet, others may be speaking out simultaneously, which causes words and silence to overlap in time. In an online learning context, ways of documenting silence need to be modified so that the conceptualisation of silence as the absence of speech is no longer essential. Instead, silence adopts a flexible stance as it denotes the lack of both written and spoken responses depending on the available choices and features of learning tools. When written communication takes over and dominates the learning environment, the act of silence then refers to nonparticipation in scripted modes. For instance, if someone posts words on a discussion forum, they should be seen as ‘speaking’. It is when they resist texting or cease to engage in a virtual dialogue that they can be captured as being ‘silent’. Regardless of the context, however, the nature of silence in both virtual and face-to-face settings continues to be equally complex as silence might represent either the unwillingness to contribute or the need to incubate thoughts and prepare for participation. In face-to-face social settings, silence does not necessarily refer to complete quietness but also represents marginal talk during classroom discussion (Remedios, Clarke & Hawthorne, 2008). In many cases, silence exists as the norm rather than an aberration. We humans spend much more time silent (but mentally active) than we do articulating thoughts. We are private as well as social beings and for many legitimate reasons do not wish to disclose our very thoughts and emotions. Although silence is often considered soundless, it is connected to the spoken word. Even when someone is silent, within the person’s mind there may be an inner voice going on (Tomlinson, 2001b) and that voice, though inaudible to everyone else, is unquestionably audible to the thinker. As Clair (1997, p. 333) expounds, ‘voice is not independent of silence’. With its inseparability from speech, silence can hardly be identified and

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1.4 The Challenge of Defining Silence

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conceptualised as a standalone construct. What makes silence even more complex also comes from what happens within the silent space itself. As far as functions of silence are concerned, there exist many views and categorisations which do not see those functions in the same way. The following are a few examples of such views. Some scholars portray silence according to what it performs in the mind. For example, when silence is perceived as mental rehearsal towards second language (L2) output, according to empirical research by Guerrero (1991), silence takes on seven characteristics: ideational (creating thoughts), mnemonic (memorising words or retrieving them from memory), textual (organising the structure of a text), instructional (applying linguistic rules), evaluative (monitoring and self-correcting language), interpersonal (visualising how to talk with others), and intrapersonal (practising inner speech). Other theorists characterise the functions of silence by connecting it with at least one more element such as communication or gesture. It is then recaptured as eloquent silence, which is intended to express or communicate a meaning (Sifianou 1997; Agyekum, 2002), or semiotic silence, which is coupled with visual elements such as gestures, facial expressions, designs, colours, flowers, and traditional artefacts which serve as ‘silent proverbs’, most of which require cultural knowledge and ability to decode and interpret (Yankah, 1995; Agyekum, 2002, p. 43). Several theorists prefer to build a dichotomy for silence by framing it in opposites such as active and passive silence (also known as busy or idle silence; Kenny, 2011). The former happens when learners choose to be silent and the latter happens when they are unable or not allowed to speak. There is also a dichotomy between weak and strong silence. The former is a form of punishment imposed on students if they misbehave; the latter, by contrast, allows personalised space for learners to develop interests and learning discovery (Bloom, 2009). Others identify silence by removing the conceptualisation of sound from it altogether, arguing that silence is not about the absence of sound but is about the absence of shared ideas. For example, in today’s social media context, such as in an online forum chat or email exchange, where neither talk nor sound is being created, silence can be identified as not typing ideas in the shared communication space. If we type words such as ‘interaction’ and ‘chat’ into Google search, their meanings often take on a digital connotation. Likewise, the concept of ‘silence’ has altered its meaning as the nature of communication in the digital age constantly changes. As much as the concepts of social presence and social interaction have been modified (Gunawardena et al., 2001; Leh, 2001), silence can also refer to the state of being quiet from writing rather than from talking (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2007). All these conceptualisations come in a wide variety and without consensus. Together, they have unpacked the word ‘silence’ into an endless range of notions, to the extent that makes it less possible for silence to stay as one

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concept anymore. Despite all this, there are still scholars who choose to keep the meaning of silence incredibly concise and make efforts to rename silence as something else. Each term arguably denotes a particular stance towards silence, in the sense that silence can become a peculiar tool to be employed for a particular purpose. In my current synthesis, there are fifty interpretive expressions that capture the essence of silence, twenty-two of which denote positive values, eighteen negative values, and ten neutral values. What follows is a list of these expressions, which is open to further expansion. Positive ways of capturing silence: interior language (Picard, 1963, p. 71); activity-involvement consciousness, for example, intended silence in art, music, politics, and religion, etc. (Dauenhauer, 1980); a self-discovery process (Ehrenhaus, 1988); subvocal articulation, that is, the phonological rehearsal of words (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989); silence as the foundation of learning (Guerrero, 1991; Lantolf, 2000; Caranfa, 2004); internalised speech (Mitchell & Myles, 1998; Ridgway, 2009, p. 49); a form of symbolic rhetoric, that is, implicit expression rather than explicit speech (Kalamaras, 1994); a way of making meaning (Kalamaras, 1994); attentional processing (Schmidt, 1994; Tomlin & Villa, 1994; VanPatten, 1996); mental activity (Wertsch & Stone, 1999); inner voice (Tomlinson, 2001b); attentive listening (Liu, 2002, p. 48); contemplative silence, that is, the use of silence for reflectivity and creativity (Caranfa, 2004, 2006); performative behaviour, that is, silence whose meaning depends on individual behaviour or action (Acheson, 2008); silent speech (Thomas, 2010); complex assortment of voices, that is, different ways of employing silence for various purposes (Bao, 2014, p. 12); ‘inner formulation system’ (Bao, 2014, p. 24); mental rehearsal (Bao, 2014, p. 172); internal output (Bao, 2014, p. 172); input processing; conscious processing (Bao, 2014); mental process (Thomas, 2010); on-task silence (Harumi, 2020; Bao, 2020b). Negative ways of capturing silence: communication avoidance (Kleinmann, 1977); withdrawal behaviour (McCroskey, 1977); failure of language (Tannen, 1985); inadequate ability in self-expression (Chen, 1985; Wu, 1991; Burns & Joyce, 1997); an impediment to communication facility, that is, silence that causes poor communication (Foss & Reitzel, 1988); poor listening skills (Pearson & West, 1991); ‘a state of idle ignorance or unlearning’, that is, silence without a purpose (Jaworski, 1993, p. 69); communication apprehension (McCroskey, 1977; Aitken & Neer, 1993); social withdrawal (Evans, 1996); conflict avoidance (Frymier & Houser, 1997); receiver apprehension, that is, refraining from responding to information for fear of misinterpreting it (Chesebro & McCroskey, 1998); communication breakdown (Yoneyama, 1999); shyness (Cole & McCroskey, 2003); low language proficiency (Nakane, 2005; Tatar, 2005); fear of incompetence (Prentice & Kramer,

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1.5 Pedagogy in the Face of the Silence Debate

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2006); lack of initiative, that is, being a passive communicator (Ping, 2010); reticence (Bao, 2014); off-task silence (Bao, 2020b). Neutral ways of capturing silence: pseudo-language, that is, non-language behaviour that acts as language (Picard, 1948/1952), also known as ‘silent language’ (Picard, 1963, p. 71); silence as belonging to language (Picard, 1963) and ‘a zone beyond the realm of language’ (Picard, 1963, p. 16), a moment in language, that is, a pause during verbal interaction (Kane, 1984, p. 17); cognitive activity (Fiumara, 1990); the silent period (Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982; Saville-Troike, 1988; Krashen, 1995; Brown, 2002); ‘silent encounter with the world’, that is, experiencing events through observation without articulation (Caranfa, 2006, p. 100); a retreat into privacy (Dauenhauer, 1980, p. 125); online silence (Bao, 2014). Besides such diverse perspectives on the meaning of silence that create both boundaries and nuances in knowledge about silence, it is the debate over the values of silence that has made it hard for education scholars to unite efforts towards a common pedagogy. While some theorists want to see more learner speech in the classroom, others prefer to leave silent learners alone. While many educators are uncertain about how to resolve these opposing views, others feel that the classroom should strike a balance between verbal and silent learning yet do not know how to organise this structure in a well-informed manner. The chapter will now turn to this discussion. 1.5

Pedagogy in the Face of the Silence Debate

The silence debate in education since the 1980s has seen three distinctive developments, denoting disapproval, favour, and a moderate view respectively. Since each of these views has been constructed by both discourse of professional opinions and empirical research efforts, it is hard to conclude which one is right or wrong. The whole idea of sharing them here is, first, to acknowledge the complexity of silence: if silence is simply the emptiness of sound, the absence of talk, or nothingness, this construct would not have sparked so many intellectual dialogues about it for such a long a time. Second, for effective pedagogy to be re-established, it is important to put all views on the table for respectful consideration, making sure that academic theorisation does not onesidedly represent a certain community of thoughts while excluding others. The first view, representing a pro-talk community, privileges speech over silence. This community perceives silence as an unnatural condition that needs to be overcome or discouraged. One of the reasons for this argument is that silence happens to ‘rob speaking subjects of the ability to construct meaning and, thus, the means to personal and cultural power’ (Kalamaras, 1994, p. xiii). Overall, scholars position silence against language and perceive communication in light of the silence–speech dichotomisation. From this perspective, it is

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speech, rather than silence, that represents the evidence of learning engagement and that demonstrates an effective measure of critical thinking. In this way, silence is a burden. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), for example, argue that this period is a time for focusing on the micro skill of listening and that such silence is not useful for language production. Krashen (1985), hypothesising the silent period, speculates that learner silence is confined to low-level processing and, if utterances are made, they are limited to brief imitation without anything creative or natural. Other scholars adopt a similar conceptualisation of silence, perceiving it as a period filled with problems and limitations, such as low comprehension (Gibbon, 2006) and lack of conversational initiation (Saville-Troike, 1988), among others. Overall, these theorists who perceive silence as a learning disadvantage put a timeframe on it with a loose deadline. Optimists argue that silence could last several months and learners will overcome it by talking (Dulay et al., 1982) while pessimists anticipate that this period might not pass and learners might never speak the target language (Brown, 2002). In doing so, some hope that silence only stays around temporarily and expect that this problem should disappear at some point in the learner’s life. The second view, representing a pro-silence community, perceives silence as the foundation of learning (Caranfa, 2004) and an active form of communication (Li, 2005). These scholars challenge the first view by arguing that treating introverted learners as non-cooperating is an injustice and that speech sometimes can get in the way of learning. They believe that any knowledge or language that does not take silence into account is inadequate (Caranfa, 2006, p. 91). There is an appeal for more understanding of the complex boundary between silence and speech. Some scholars even question if such boundaries exist. Jaworski (1993, p. 25), for example, asked: ‘Do we talk only when we are speaking?’ If our answer is ‘no’ or ‘not really’ (i.e. we talk even when we are not speaking), then there is an agreement that one cannot simply deny the contributing role of silence in communication and that speech could be considered as extending beyond linguistic vocalisation. Some scholars who promote silent learning conceptualise this process as contemplative pedagogy. It encourages students to find a voice for their thoughts and wisdom, using those to bond with peers and build a sense of community (see, for example, Barbezat & Bush, 2013). The third view, taking a more inclusive stance, argues that both speech and silence can generate knowledge. Scholars resist the dichotomy between speech and silence in the hope of treating both dimensions as equals. Since both speech and silence are contextually dependent behaviours (see, for example, Armstrong, 2007b), they must be judged in context rather than in isolation. One example of such a contextual factor is instructor immediacy (i.e. the way the teacher receives or welcomes student participation), which, according to

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1.6 The Need to View Silence in Context

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a study by Christensen et al. (1995), affects learner willingness to participate. Some acknowledge that ‘silence may be a state in which one gains knowledge, or maybe a state of idle ignorance or unlearning’ (Jaworski, 1993, p. 69). Others recognise the fact that silent students ‘find listening, thinking, and reflecting as more effective ways of learning than talking’ (Tatar, 2005, p. 285) and this way of learning should be recognised and supported rather than resisted and misrepresented. 1.6

The Need to View Silence in Context

My stance towards silence would involve the need to examine it in the specific environment in which it is exercised, rather than making a self-determining judgement about silence by itself. In my observation, the significance of silence in every individual is not stable but changes across national cultures, educational scenarios, and group dynamics. For example, students who cannot connect with a discussion topic, perhaps owing to its irrelevance to their lives, might keep silent as they feel that their view is being neglected. However, these same students when moving to another class with exposure to more relatable topics would feel that they were in an environment where their silent reflection was nurtured and respected. One therefore cannot look at the behaviour of students in a static way and label it as a dominant trait. In many public situations, there are moments when talk is appreciated by some people while deemed unnecessary by others. An example demonstrating the relevance of silence in context is when John McEnroe justified his temporary silence when commenting on Nick Kyrgios versus Novak Djokovic final at the Wimbledon Tennis Championship by saying: ‘When you’re watching something great, sometimes it’s better to let it speak for itself’ (Guardian, 16 July 2022, p. 17). Differences in cultural upbringing represent another challenging area to comprehend. Since silence can be viewed by one culture as normal and by another as abnormal, sometimes two people may disagree with each other about the use of silence. In a 2019-released television series titled Duty/ Shame (Giri/Haji 義理/恥), there is a scene where two characters, a Japanese man named Kenzo and an Irish woman named Sarah, meet in a cafe. After exchanging some knowledge about each other’s families, Sarah suddenly asks: ‘Do you have any scars?’ to which Kenzo shows one on his arm but is curious: ‘Why do you want to know?’ She replies: ‘I’m not sure why. I just feel the need to fill in the silence between us.’ Kenzo becomes more interested: ‘Why are you not comfortable with silence?’ to which Sarah has no explanation. Such mismatch in the internalisation of silence and speech is also common in education. Some of my colleague who are teachers from the English-speaking West and who work in East Asia often feel that student silence easily makes them tired, while my East Asian acquaintances who study with these teachers

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state that teachers’ constant talkativeness makes them tired too. This scenario demonstrates that there are no universally desirable amounts of speech and silence, respectively, in all classroom settings. When reflecting on my classroom behaviour as a graduate student, I can see that every time I experienced a failed attempt to speak up in class, silence would take on a different meaning from the previous time I practised it. Because of this, silence can hardly be captured as one phenomenon. On one occasion, being called upon to answer a question, I could not speak. Although when my lecturer raised a question, my answer-searching process began immediately, I did not have sufficient time to respond. When I did not, it looked like I was shy and uncooperative, which prompted my lecturer to turn to another student for an answer. Sometimes this student behaved just like me, that is, still processing information and having not reached a point for successful articulation; the lecturer would lose patience and assume we had low learning enthusiasm. Keaten and Kelly (2000) explain such hesitation by commenting that students ‘avoid communication because they believe it is better to remain silent than to risk appearing foolish’ (p. 168). Sometimes this is the case but at other times it is not. Sometimes, silence may look like reticence but it is being actively used to produce quality speech (Huang & Renandya, 2016). For this reason, teacher openmindedness, flexibility (Tomlinson, 2015), and acceptance towards all kinds of learning inclinations (Han, 2017), including silent learning, would help maximise learning outcomes (Fadilah, Widiati & Latief, 2019). Overall, although silence is open to both positive and negative interpretations, the ultimate ambition of silenceinclusive pedagogy is to embrace the possibility that learning can flourish in both silence and speech, advocating diversity rather than mutual exclusion. As Picard (1948/1952, p. 15/27) maintains, ‘language and silence belong together: language has knowledge of silence as silence has knowledge of language’. Communicators who employ speech effectively are those who understand silence; likewise, communicators who employ silence meaningfully are also those who understand speech. As Zembylas and Michaelides (2004) indicate, respect for silence in educational practice would signify our respect for the self and otherness. 1.7

Structure of the Book

The book begins by highlighting the inadequate distribution of silence in the current discourse in education. Chapter 1 (Embracing Silence in Education) reviews the need to expand our understanding of silence as well as the appeal for applying that awareness in teaching practices. The discussion captures the challenge of defining silence and explains how the silence debate can be connected to pedagogy. Chapter 2 (The Presence of Silence in Second Language Acquisition) identifies the presence of silence in second language acquisition by looking beyond

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1.7 Structure of the Book

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the initial silent period to examine various scholarly attitudes towards the role of silence in SLA works and to point out the gap in SLA research on silence. Chapter 3 (Trends in Silence Research) reviews the history of how silence inquiry began and evolved and then surveys major trends in research that both support and disapprove of the presence of silence in education. Chapter 4 (Elements that Shape Pedagogy for Silence) identifies key elements that shape pedagogy for silence. It unpacks the association between silence and speech, recommends a set of principles and strategies for productive silence and offers a procedure for task design to support the reflective learner. Chapter 5 (Problematising Silence) evaluates the question ‘why silent?’ in research and reconceptualises how such inquiry should be contextualised to make the investigation more meaningful and freer from prejudice. To do so, the discussion presents a range of critical scenarios where silence fails to function productively, elaborates how problems occur in context, and suggests ways of coping with each of those problems. Chapter 6 (Ways of Addressing Classroom Silence) addresses the question of what every teacher should do to cope with undesirable silence in the classroom as it impedes a vibrant climate of open discussion and mutual learning. A case study of unhappy silent learners in context is then presented to demonstrate how one might suffer from poor silence and what can be done to improve such situations. Chapter 7 (Online Silence) defines the meaning of online silence, explains how it occurs in virtual classroom settings and unpacks the phenomenon as learning engagement and the lack of it in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. The discussion argues that online silence represents both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. Chapter 8 (Coping with Undesirable Online Silence) presents some challenging characteristics of online education with a focus on several contradictions between teacher and student expectations. A set of practical suggestions is offered to assist teachers in coping with undesirable online silence. These strategies address components such as learning content, communication, choices, collaboration, task performance, protocols, and scaffolding of student learning. Chapter 9 (Silence in ELT Task Design) justifies the need to consider the role of silence in task design and task performance. Since the relationship between tasks and silence is under-explored, the author has conducted a series of research projects to uncover such dynamics. These studies are reported and discussed in detail, with concrete examples and pedagogical implications for materials development. Chapter 10 (Some Ideas for Silence Research) comments on the status quo of silence research to this day in terms of what has and has not been sufficiently investigated. This overview highlights productive research themes, themes that need more empirical work, themes that seem to stand still without new

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outcomes, and themes that are currently neglected. There are suggestions for how to move the field of silence studies forward. 1.8

Concluding Insights

Silence sometimes reminds us of the human effort to visualise ghosts. To lucidly portray one represents a challenge because the people who have had experiences with ghosts often do not share the same perception of what ghosts look, act, or sound like. Likewise, all scholars having experiences with silence might not identify and explain it in the same manner. Since scholars do not fully understood silence but cherish a desire to capture it, some have outlined it in a fathomable way through the hypothesis of the ‘silent period’, although there have been only minimal research efforts to elucidate its nature. By capturing silence as a phase, we hope that this phase will pass for learning to advance. In doing this, we place a boundary around the construct and restrict not only silence itself but also our understanding of it. Historically, a consensus has not been reached about what the silent period genuinely means, with differing views on how long this period lasts and when it ends. The silent period remains a temporary way of conceptualising silence and a disputable concept in ELT. As discussed in this chapter, silence is too complex and flexible to be framed in one concrete definition. Because of this, one reasonable system of identifying silence might be to position it in a specific context and speak of silence in relation to its respective situational elements. Arguing that silence is by no means contextfree, the book adopts this awareness as the groundwork of most discussions. After all, it is important to note that cognitive involvement and verbal participation may not be the same thing (see, for example, Terenzini, Theophilides & Lorang, 1984; Hirschy & Wilson, 2002). Teachers cannot simply point to students’ amount of verbal participation and conclude that high verbalisation shows evidence of high cognitive involvement and vice versa. Instead, it would be helpful to observe both silence and talk, respectively and simultaneously, in their authentic classroom settings to see how these constructs function. Understanding silence is a challenge. To link that understanding with pedagogy is to take on an extra challenge. Putting that pedagogy into operation is pushing it even harder. Having developed this awareness, however, should not deter educators from creating a dialogue about silence-inclusive pedagogy. Our ambition is that, eventually, thoughtful teachers and learners should be able to move towards the ability to listen to each other’s speech and silence alike. Hopefully, this conversation will keep evolving and, with sufficient persistence, we might be able to lift ELT pedagogy to a slightly different level.

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The Presence of Silence in Second Language Acquisition

2.1

Looking beyond the Silent Period

The silent period is an enduring hypothesis. It reassures learners that their early silence in L2 learning follows a natural process and that they are allowed to be silent without having to feel guilty. Benefiting from knowledge about L1 development, the silent period justifies a legitimate time for learners to listen and figure things out until they become ready to speak the target language. Over the past four decades, scholars have contributed greatly to the awareness of how learners who embark on a second language experience initial silence. This period has been identified with characteristics such as a phase for struggle and negotiation with L2 input (Dulay et al., 1982; Krashen, 1982, 1985). It is through struggle that one learns to learn. Based on observational research, scholars continue to further the understanding of this construct by crediting it as peripheral participation (Siegel, 2003); a non-passive alternative learning pathway (Siegel, 2003); space for observation (Lancaster, 2001; Rogoff, 2003; Flewitt, 2005); low comprehension (Gibson, 2006); a psychologically active stage (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006); a safe domestic learning space (Hancock & Gillen, 2007); a time of struggle and ‘an intense process of meaning making’ (Iddings & Jang, 2008, p. 587); and ‘invisible learning’ (Drury, 2013, p. 381), among others. In a word, the discourse on the silent period manages to capture why and how learners hold back from speech during their early exposure to a second language. This hypothesis, however, is not without limitations. The drawback of the silent period does not lie in what is portrayed within it but in what is not portrayed at the end of it. The ideal of a ‘period’ indicates a borderline where silence should eventually metamorphose into speech. In many realistic cases, silence does not become speech but evolves into new forms of learning (that are neither conventional silence nor conventional speech). The silent period hypothesis, unfortunately, disregards such evolvement. Below are four circumstances, which are drawn from research and observation, denoting what happens when the silent period proceeds and transforms (instead of coming to an 17

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Silence in Second Language Acquisition

end). The silent period is useful in explaining the first of these circumstances but not the rest. The silent period evolves into speech It is common for learners who experience an initial silent stage in L2 learning to finally accumulate sufficient linguistic intake to move away from silence and become articulate in the language. This scenario is widely recognised, such as through research by Karniol (1990), Krupa-Kwiatkowski (1998), and Klenk (2004), to name a few. The silent period hypothesis captures this phenomenon efficiently. The silent period persists indefinitely In some learners, silence is permanent rather than temporary. When silence never halts for speech to take over, such silence cannot be framed as a period or a stage. A friend of mine upon embarking on French learning had a strict teacher who would frown on mistakes and thus, he decided to pursue French only for school exams. My friend abandoned the attempt to speak French and remained mute in the language forever. Gibbons (1985) through research explains such cases as prolonged silence that results from psychological withdrawal. The silent period does not occur In SLA discourse, it is acknowledged that the silent period may not apply to all learners (Saville-Troike, 1988; Ellis, 2012). While most research confirms the presence of the silent period, some studies disprove it. The silent period is considered absent when learners make small efforts from day one of their L2 learning to utter words in the target language and continue to do so. Naturalistic observational studies by Hatch (1974), Huang & Hatch (1978), Hakuta (1978), Saville-Troike (1988), and Bligh (2014) show no evidence of the silent period among some children who, instead of keeping silent at the initial stage of language exposure, get into the habit of repeating words they hear and keep practising private speech. Such early rehearsal of utterances, though minimal and formulaic, demonstrates that the silent period does not apply to these children. Many articulate words early thanks to a comfortable learning environment where they not only practise speech individually but also join group time for nursery rhymes and singing activities in kindergarten contexts. The silence period occurs and disappears, then returns Although SLA discourse has not acknowledged the phenomenon of multiple cycles of the silent period within the same learner, a case study by Bao (2014) on Australian students’ L2 learning documents silence in recurring periods rather than an initial temporary stage. In the study, five out of ten participants being interviewed explain that for them, ‘it is hard to separate the silent period from a speech period since there is no such distinction’ in their learning experience (pp. 163–4). Although from beginner to intermediate levels these learners moved from silence to speech, as their skills grew more advanced they would

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2.1 Looking beyond the Silent Period

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prefer to engage more in inner talk. Data from the same project also reveals the silent stage and the speech stage would keep alternating throughout students’ lifetimes in response to constantly changing social and academic circumstances. For instance, some students would prefer to keep silent in a class with many chattering classmates who randomly blurt out trivial ideas. Such a decision occurs as a way to set themselves apart from peers that they do not appreciate. By the same token, my conversation with a university lecturer in Japan, Jonathan, who migrated from the United States, reveals a similar phenomenon during social communication in which silence demonstrates a different level of socio-cognitive maturity. During an interview with me (Lost in Citation, 2020), he said: Growing up, I was very talkative. I had a big personality and I would get in trouble. Teachers would write in my report card ‘he talks too much in class’ [. . .] but as I got older, my personality has shifted. I’m much more likely to be quiet in social situations and so, when looking at myself as a talkative person, I remember looking at shy people. I sort of wonder why are they shy, why aren’t they talking. I would have my own opinion about why they weren’t talking, but now my personality has shifted. I almost respect people who don’t talk as much. My idea of intelligence or personality has totally shifted from when I was a child until now.

Since different learners will experience their initial silent period in different ways, research on this theme is built mostly on case studies. According to Bligh’s (2014) review of a range of studies on the silent period in the early years among non-English-speaking children in England, most research on this theme often addresses a linguistic focus while neglecting the affective, individual, and sociocultural dimensions of this phenomenon that would play important roles in how long L2 learners may stay in silence. In my personal experience as a language learner, early silence did not last long owing to the involvement of affective factors. I remember the first day when I began to learn Russian in school, my classmates and I already started to exchange basic questions about personal information. Every time a new lesson came around, we expanded our language play by talking about other concepts such as hobbies and feelings. We hardly kept quiet but took every opportunity to utter new words. One plausible reason for this talkativeness is that, by the time we began learning the language, some of us had already spoken another European language, such as French or English, and thus were used to conversing in a Western tongue. Besides, we were good friends and bonded together through our outgoing personalities. A third reason is that we were taught by a humorous teacher who did not mind making a fool of himself and would allow us to be mischievous in the language. A case study by Wong Fillmore (1982) on Mexican children in the United States displays the role of sociocultural factors during the silent period. Mexican children who wished to engage with others to build friendships in

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early-years settings would not hesitate to try and use whatever English they knew. Such desire to blend in socially plays a huge role in shortening the silent period. Research by Bligh (2014) on young bilinguals in England also reveals that not every child experiences the silent period but it occurs only when the child’s mother tongue is disregarded. This means that when children do not speak English but other languages are accepted and understood, they will use the language they know best. Communication will go on and the silent period is considered to be non-existent. When someone is silent in one language but not in another, the silent period is not happening in that person. Another case study on Australian students (Bao, 2014) showcases individual factors during the silent period that make this construct recurrent in a good way. Candace and Helen, who learn French and Japanese respectively, employ silence continually as a mental space for speech formulation. In this space, a range of activities happens in their minds including memorising words, listening to dialogues, getting used to sounds and syntax, and figuring out ways of using the target language. Such uses of silence show that silence does not seem to stay within a designated stage but pervades persistently as it alternates with speech. Observing the unpredictable nature of silence, Granger (2004) made this appeal: ‘Silence in second language acquisition is a much larger phenomenon than what is named the silent period’ (p. 3) With this awareness, let us turn our attention to how silence itself has been conceptualised in second language acquisition. 2.2

Various Attitudes towards Silence in SLA Works

My scrutiny of thirty-two recent SLA books over the past two decades (2001–22) reveals varying positionings on silence when this construct is mentioned with dissimilar understandings (Table 2.1). The headings in the seven columns are not predetermined but come from the meaning of silence as identified in these books. The volumes mentioned in the table below are sequenced from the least to the most optimistic views on the role of silence in second language acquisition. The shaded coding is provided for convenient reading of the information summarised in the table. The books in the dark-grey rows from 1 to 9 do not express any interest in silence at all. The light-grey boxes represent the content of scholarly interest in silence. For example, book 12 only mentions silence as the silent period but not in any other categories (as all the other light-grey boxes are blank). In the meantime, every white box means that there is a mention of silence (the content of which is stated in the heading of that column). It seems clear that scholars do not share the same view on what silence means. The observations below are drawn from the analysis. The points made below are sequenced from the most common views on silence to the least common view on silence.

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2.2 Various Attitudes towards Silence in SLA Works

Table 2.1 The distribution of understandings of silence in SLA books

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Table 2.1 (cont.)

Dark grey: no mention of silence in the whole book Light grey: no mentions of silence in some categories White: mentions of silence in some categories

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2.2 Various Attitudes towards Silence in SLA Works

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• Twelve books recognise silence as part of communication (11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32). • Seven books contain no mention of silence whatsoever (1 to 9). • Seven books mention silence as a characteristic of early cinema and as a common mode of reading practice (13, 14, 18, 26, 28, 29, 30). • Six books acknowledge that silence is useful for thought processing (11, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32). • Four books refer to silence as the silent period (15, 19, 29, 30). • Three books denote silence as poor linguistic proficiency (12, 23, 31). • Three books conceptualise silence as helpful for classroom pedagogy (30, 31, 32). • The most silence-friendly book is 32, which identifies silence with various learning benefits. Proportionately, silence exhibits minimal significance in language acquisition. It is important to note that most research discourse on silence in education has developed outside the field of SLA. On the one hand, silence researchers are not SLA experts; on the other hand, SLA scholars do not seem to borrow the findings of silence research to enrich the SLA body of knowledge. The main aspect of silence that remains the trademark in SLA is the silent period, a theory that not only sounds arbitrary in its documentation but also generates little research. In a word, it seems that SLA is an insider territory where it is speech that makes sense and deserves attention while silence is treated with great caution and reluctance. The minimal presence of silence in SLA works can be explained through a historical lens. Although the evolvement of SLA began with an interest in cognitive processes, over the decades it has gradually shifted its concern to social processes. During the 1950s, cognitive psychologists resisted the dominant behaviourist view by proposing to examine the interior of the mind rather than observing exterior behaviour. This was because scholars wished to see how the brain works in responding to information and in maintaining the continuity of competence development rather than looking at development as distinct stages. This stance exerts a strong impact on many disciplines, including SLA, with the occasional appeal to investigate mental processing (Ellis, 1999; Hulstijn, 2007) based on the awareness that it is hard to understand how fluency is acquired unless one finds out how the mental rehearsal works to take a learner to advanced L2 proficiency. The above view, however, was later opposed by the development of interactionism during the 1980s, which argues that learners’ mental effort is insufficient but it is social interaction that provides conditions for language to be adjusted and enhanced. Relying on such thinking, SLA research has moved in this direction to consider how interaction enhances learning and shows evidence of acquisition. Over the years, SLA researchers have

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Silence in Second Language Acquisition

developed more interest in audible talk than in the invisible thought in the mind. As a result of all this, ELT pedagogy also learns from SLA research and invests more effort in L2 speech production than in how the mind works (Pickering, 2012). Although some scholars have argued that SLA is context-free, that is, the cognitive mechanism that drives learning is the same across all contexts (Loewen, 2015), research interests that vary across different regions of the world do not show that it is context-free. For example, while SLA research in English-speaking countries focuses mainly on the English language, SLA research outside of these countries tends to embrace the learning of diverse languages (Butler, 2017). In research on silence over the past twenty years, the contribution of scholars from non-English-speaking backgrounds occupies a remarkable proportion and demonstrates how language acquisition is context-bound. For example, silence seems more accepted in Japan than it is in Australia because Japanese silence forms a natural part of social dynamics while Australian silence potentially disrupts social cohesion and symbolises suppression. While the West often conceptualises SLA in a cognitioncentred approach, many non-Western scholars have situated SLA within a cultural dimension. While such acts of bringing cultural issues into SLA might disturb the purity of SLA tradition, they conceive novel ways of expanding the field. 2.3

Interpreting Views on Silence in SLA Research

Although SLA was born out of the tradition of psycholinguistics with a dual attentiveness to both linguistic behaviour and psychological processes of cognitive development, the investigation into speech and silence does not contain a balance between the two. Instead, far more research in L2 acquisition is founded upon the crescendos of speech, with a special interest in audible output and verbal interaction. While learners’ verbal practice is highly valued as the key contribution to language development, silence, being an interior mirror of speech, is treated with much less recognition. Unlike comprehensive SLA books which need to cover a diverse range of topics, individual journal articles sometimes choose to focus on silence as the main discussion. In other words, it is individual articles rather than comprehensive SLA books that capture the essence of the silence debate. My reading into such works reveals a rainbow of dissimilar ideas, which contradict each other at times. For example, some researchers state with conviction that silence is detrimental to education; others claim without hesitation that it is a brilliant pathway to learning. To some extent, the silence debate reminds us of the classic parable of six blind men arguing about what an elephant looks like without being able to resolve the disparity.

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Imagine that silence is an elephant, and scholars are blind men holding on to their peculiar conceptualisations. Their differing views would go somewhat like this: Silence is thought that cannot be heard. Silence is speech that can be heard by the thinker. Silence is a delay in speech (i.e. a pause before speech continues) Silence is incompetence in communication. Silence is a psychological self-defence against criticism. Silence is a mediating tool in social contexts. These assertions summarise the silence discourse in language education over the past four decades. Below is further elaboration on each of the conceptualisations with relevant references. The conceptualisations, however, do not always eliminate one another. Instead, they denote distinctive interests towards the meaning and value of the construct, which not only end up revealing the complexity of silence but, more strikingly, demonstrate the lack of consensus among SLA scholars about how silence should be interpreted. 2.3.1

Silence As Thought

Silence is a matter of selfhood as characterised by a self-orientation in thinking and socialising habits. While sociable people come to know their life experiences through interacting with or borrowing the lenses of others, silent people enjoy the comfort of absorbing perceptions within themselves (Burkitt, 1991) and even shape their thoughts better if they are not busy interacting. Silence helps personal reflection (Stephenson, 2008). This inclination is somehow acknowledged by Vygotsky’s observation that ‘the true direction of the development of thinking’ is ‘not from the individual to the social but from the social to the individual’ (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 36). It is simply about how the individual mind works best and if a language learner happens to be this type of person, they do not need to speak out constantly to acquire language most effectively. Since these learners already have their recipes for interpreting linguistic data, forcing them to speak at the wrong time means taking away their favourite formulas and disrupting their learning. It is, after all, helpful to understand that ‘intrapersonal processes are as important as interpersonal processes’ (Ehrman & Dörnyei, 1998, p. 13). Stevick (1980) refers to these interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics as what goes on ‘within and between people’ (p. 5). Silence is connected to reflection, insights, problem-solving, and learning (Bies, 2009). Sometimes, the silent learner may have reached a proficient command of the language but chooses to keep quiet for other reasons than a lack of verbal ability.

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Silence in Second Language Acquisition

When one assumes that silence is about thinking, that assumption refers to explicit knowledge in the conscious mind. For example, when learning becomes cognitively complex and demanding, the stimulus domain may be activated and when the rules seem simple and salient, learners will tend to resort to a more conscious mode. It has been acknowledged that the success of L2 acquisition is often connected to an implicit learning mechanism (Reber, 1967, 1993; Krashen, 1982). 2.3.2

Silence As Speech

Silence is perceived as a form of talk. If talk is sometimes referred to as externalised speech (Ridgway, 2009, p. 49) or interactive speech (Saito, 1992), silence can involve articulatory rehearsal mechanism, internalised speech (Ridgway, 2009, p. 49), subvocal articulation (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989), or internalisation of speech patterns (Mitchell & Myles, 1998). Silence is output in the form of inner verbalisation. Acting as ‘verbal thinking’ (Guerrero, 2013, p. 508), silence provides conditions for mental effort management (Latkowska, 2009), which assists, for example, conversion between languages as performed in the mind of a translator (Whyatt, 2009). For this reason, it is important not to overlook the personal and cognitive depth of individual learning in shaping pedagogy (Stevick, 1976; Kristjánsson, 2013; Oxford, 2016). Proactive inner speech is a strength of many advanced learners and communicators. Scholarly research has proven the important role of such practice in improving the quality of output, self-motivation, memorisation, and language acquisition in general (Tomlinson, 2020). Vygotsky also argues that inner speech marks the higher development of human conscious activity (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Tomlinson (2001b) points out that some learners can develop an L2 inner voice during the silent period, which benefits L2 development. Inner speech, according to Saville-Troike (1987, 1988), might have both a reflective nature and a social nature. These views taken together suggest that the silent period may have a social nature and thus the boundary between silence and the silent period becomes less significant. As Ridgway (2009, p. 49) observes, ‘thinking in a language provides practice which is arguably as good as speaking it. Processes as important as automatisation continue to operate and one’s proficiency continues to develop.’ This view connects the first and the second positioning towards silence in arguing that internal speech is a tool for formulating ideas. Research by Bao (2014) reveals the common use of experimental speech among many students, that is, some students enjoy talking to others as a way of engaging with themselves. Although on the outside, their speech is directed towards a listener, deep down the actual intention of that performance is no

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more than the practice of thinking aloud. Such articulation often takes on the trial nature of self-talk and can be of a half-baked quality rather than fully developed output. Cognitively speaking, this self-engaged speech is not different from the process of forming an inner voice. The only distinction is that the former is audible while the latter is not. 2.3.3

Silence As Private Speech

Unlike inner speech that is acoustically silent, private speech is not. It is a form of self-talk or self-whispering that, though audible to the speaker, may go unnoticed by others. Despite this difference, private speech is similar to silence in that both are directed towards the self rather than others, that is, representing dialogues in the mind rather than in a social sphere. Examples of private speech can be individual prayer that is not the Lord’s Prayer spoken in unison (Childs, 1983) and arithmetical calculation commonly occurring among primary school children (Ostad, 2013), among others. When we are trying to find a misplaced key or memorise an address, we instinctively resort to such speech. Scholars such as Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and Jean William Fritz Piaget fundamentally disagree on the developmental sequence of this construct. According to Piaget (1923/1962), the child’s social instinct is late in developing but self-centred utterances occur first. Vygotsky (1934/1986), on the contrary, believes that the earliest speech of the child is essentially social and later, as the child develops, such social speech becomes divided into egocentric and communicative speech. While Piaget views private speech as having an immature nature, Vygotsky sees it as a tool for cognitive self-regulation. This debate, however, can be resolved to some extent through John-Steiner’s (1992) observation that private speech can be both thinking aloud and self-regulatory. While the former can be immature, the latter is not. Being both a habit of the mind and that of the tongue, private speech can serve as a helpful psycholinguistic tool for aiding the development of L2 fluency. 2.3.4

Silence As a Delay in Speech

Silence is sometimes described as a stage before one develops the ability to speak (Bleyhl, 2008; Jong, 2008; Stephenson, 2008; Lakshmanan, 2013). It is the pause between talks. In communication, a pause allows one to absorb and reflect (Bruneau, 1973). It serves to build listening competence and to concentrate on comprehension rather than language production (Dulay et al., 1982; Krashen, 1982). Particularly during the silent period, no sufficient competence exists (Krashen, 1995) and initiation of conversation does not happen (SavilleTroike, 1988), sometimes owing to the lack of comprehension (Gibbon, 2006).

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Utterances, if any, are limited to only brief imitations rather than spontaneous, creative, or natural output (Dulay et al., 1982; Krashen, 1985). Silence as interpreted above is a non-linguistic part of language. Occasionally, it represents segments of paralanguage that occur as integral parts of linguistic utterances, including words and phrases. Silence is useful to research for an understanding of phonological and morphological dynamics (Bassetti, 2008) as well as features of fluency, including pauses (Segalowitz, 2013) and transitions between speaking turns (Markee, 2013). In communication, silence cannot make sense by itself unless there is the presence of speech around it to support or shape what it is supposed to mean. Silence can be used for writing production. For example, a silent movie clip was productively employed for students to practise writing a narrative script, in a research study conducted by an ESL programme in New York City (Ekiert, 2010). 2.3.5

Silence As Low Competence

Silence, to some scholars, signifies a refusal or an inability to communicate (Wardhaugh, 1985), poor verbal fluency (Pallotti, 2009; Lamber & Kormos, 2014), a lack of participation owing to insufficient knowledge (Sert, 2013), and detrimental behaviour to learning (Collin, 1996). Silence also indicates disapproval or low comprehension during a conversation. For example, when a native speaker fails to understand a non-native speaker, the former might choose to keep silent as a way of providing negative feedback (Carroll, 2001). Jaworski & Sachdev (1998), reporting a study on teacher beliefs about silence and talk, noticed that silence is often contrasted with good academic achievement while talk is identified with positive features such as ‘humour’, ‘commitment’, ‘enthusiasm’, and ‘strength of character’ (p. 287). In pedagogy, learner silence is sometimes perceived as a sign of ignorance. Some theorists advise students that it is better to remain silent if they fail to understand teacher questions or lack the confidence to provide answers so that the lesson can move on with more effective contributions by others (Breen, 2001). Some research in the 1960s and 1970s concluded that students who remain reticent in class are often perceived as socially and intellectually incompetent (Gordon & Thomas, 1967) as they make poorer school progress than their peers (Stevenson et al., 1976; Colligan, 1979). Silence in SLA discourse until the 1980s was mentioned as resistance to speech (Harder, 1980), difficulty in performance, and lack of comprehension (Dulay et al., 1982; Gibbons, 1985). It is argued that successful learning is often connected with social skills (Oxford, 2003). Since interactional competence requires a wide range of actions such as managing social introduction, turn-taking, initiation of talk, closing conversation, changing topics, and interrupting, among others (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei & Thurrell, 1995), those

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who frequently remain silent would not experience sufficient hands-on practice to push communication skills forward. 2.3.6

Silence As a Psychological Defence

Being part of behaviour and individuality, silence can function as a shield for learners to resist or avoid humiliation (Duff, 2002), a demonstration of anxiety (Dewaele, 2013), a form of control and resistance in classroom settings (Gilmore, 1985), or a way to speed up task performance when thinking aloud seems too time-consuming (Bowles, 2010, 2013). Silence also denotes individual differences. Learners are not the same in the degree of how much they talk or keep quiet. They vary in levels of introversion, extroversion, anxiety (Skehan, 1989), communicative intentions and linguistic conventions (Harder, 1980), affective characteristics such as alienation, frustration, resistance, and tolerability (Granger, 2004) as well as social-psychology features such as cognitive style, hemisphere specialisation, language aptitude, and personality (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Brown, 1994). The recognition of these stimuli in SLA discourse proves that silence is far more complex than an expression of incompetence. Besides, awareness of learner differences also helps explain how well and how soon someone acquires a second language (Schmidt, 2010). 2.3.7

Silence As a Mediating Tool

According to Ellis (2005), when learners struggle to produce output that is beyond their existing ability, they employ explicit knowledge of L2 structure to scaffold and construct utterances, and one way of monitoring and testing the value of an utterance is by saying it to oneself. This act of self-talk can be considered one way of using silence. Research shows that many L2 learners practise spontaneously speaking to themselves for years without realising that they have such skills and habits (Guerrero, 1991). According to Innocenti (2002, p. 62), ‘most of the words we use in our inner speech, before speaking or writing a sentence, exist in auditory or visual images in our consciousness’. The nature of such practice is that learners are not aware of how silence is used and thus, it is educators’ responsibility to raise this understanding as a learning strategy. It has been widely acknowledged that purposeful attention and awareness play important roles in language learning success (McLaughlin, 1990; Schmidt, 1990; Long, 1990). Private speech and inner voice have a selfregulatory nature (John-Steiner, 1985a) that serves to draw one’s attention (Frawley, 1997). The internal world and the social world can be quietly negotiated through mental processing. Such negotiation, which is known as internalisation (Winegar, 1997), has the potential to become useful in future communication.

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Mental rehearsal supports the enhancement of motor performance, especially through the use of kinaesthetic imageries (Ryan & Simon, 1982; Woolfolk et al., 1985; Decety and Ingvar, 1990). Vygotsky (1987) believes that humans do not deal directly with the physical world but rely on mediating tools. Arguably, the mental facility to control our surroundings can be regarded as one such tool. As Lantolf (2000) indicates, mental rehearsal as private practice plays a supporting role in tasks that involve the use of L2 ‘where the primary goal is not learning but performance’ (p. 88). Although it is often acknowledged that implicit, subconscious conditions of learning, rather than conscious awareness, build a foundation for productive verbalisation, Robinson (1997) discovered in a study that learners with good grammar sensitivity have the aptitude to transfer explicit knowledge to verbalisation, which means that there is a connection between what we know, how we think, and how much we can perform in language. In other words, the mind and verbal mechanism have such a strong association that in many cases it is possible to speak an L2 well even though one may not articulate L2 frequently. 2.4

Current Gaps in SLA Research on Silence

To this day, empirical research evidence remains insufficient to illuminate the role of silence in SLA. The first gap lies in the serious disproportion between research into speech and silence respectively: while our knowledge about how verbal interaction works seems rich, our knowledge about how silence works remains poor. This is because SLA has shown less interest in private speech than overt production (Saville-Troike, 1988) and seems ‘insufficiently curious about silence as part of the second language learning process’ (Granger, 2004, p. 30). While acknowledging silence as the initial stage of language study, SLA scholarly research until recently remained uncertain about how to proceed to address the continuing role of silence, that is, when one’s silence period has already passed but unexpectedly returns to the learner. Interestingly, more research on silence has come from other disciplines, including psychology and sociology, than research in second language acquisition (Bao, 2014). Although SLA discourse has built discussions on the silent period (Krashen, 1985), the inner-speech stage (Vygotsky, 1934/1986), internalisation (Winegar, 1997), private speech (Saville-Troike, 1988), and inner voice (Tomlinson, 2001b), it has been acknowledged that today’s research on inner speech is not much easier than such research in Vygotsky’s time (Ehrich, 2006). Given all the subtleties and complexities of human talk that make it hard to research on talk (Edwards & Westgate, 1987), research on silence is many times more difficult as there is virtually no scientific method to transcribe silence. Arguably, SLA scholars more than anyone else have the responsibility to take care of this limitation in the field.

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The relationship between silence and output remains insignificant in SLA discourse. Little is known about how pre-verbal messages are processed in the mind. Pre-verbal messages are part of the conceptualisation stage of language processing, which precedes the formulation and articulation stages in the speech production model proposed by Levelt (1989). According to the interaction hypothesis (Long, 1996), which reconciles the input and output hypotheses, face-to-face verbal interaction is one of the key foundations for L2 acquisition. The theory emphasises teacher–learner dynamics (Hall and Walsh, 2002) and peer-interactive tasks (Ohta, 2001), both of which are centred on talk, such as who says what, who asks, and who responds, while the relationship between teacher talk and learner inner-speech dynamics is often not mentioned. The connection between silent thinking and output will need further research to illuminate it. Within what is available in the current discourse, this discussion will not be more ambitious than triggering many fundamental concepts to hint at this potential connection. Silence is often studied holistically while specific contextualisation of silence across diverse educational settings is not strong in most research. One might wish to keep in mind that silence, in a similar vein to talk, is not contextfree and thus cannot be judged in a vacuum. If talk must be socio-culturally appropriate depending on who, where, when, what role, what content, and what amount, silence as part of language also shares similar needs for one to be welcome, accepted, valued, and understood rather than to cause confusion and misinterpretation. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) maintain that social competence includes factors such as power, politeness, and cultural awareness. Arguably, if these elements play a role in how one communicates through talk, they also must play a role in how one appropriately keeps silent. 2.5

Concluding Insights

The reason why the discourse on SLA does not share views on silence is that scholars often look at different kinds of silence. Arguably, not all types of silence benefit L2 development. Some kinds of silence facilitate SLA while others may not. Silence activates language input through attentive listening, to begin with. What SLA-driven pedagogy needs to do is align the right input to the right level in learners and guide them in self-monitoring that input. It has been acknowledged that for L2 development to be strong, comprehensible input in a second language should come in great quantity or high frequency. The richness of input, however, does not guarantee learning success but it must depend on how learners receive it. When learners are exposed to input that is hard to understand, the mind must learn how to process it. According to Faerch and Kasper (1986), when input makes the mind struggle, it may not be the problem of the input itself, but the struggle occurs because learners do not have

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sufficient knowledge to understand that input right away. Since learners stay at different abilities, the same input may be more effectively processed by one than by others. Silence has an unsettled nature. Historically, academic attempts to make conclusive comments on what silence means, including framing it as the silence period or portraying it as an obstacle to learning, have met with intellectual suspicion. Unfortunately, it is not up to scholars to decide how silence should behave but silence already has its course, varying according to who employs it. The challenging question is: should teachers condition silence in ways that would serve teaching and learning or should they let silence occur first and then decide how to respond to it? This is a question that SLA researchers must answer and, for that, let us turn our attention to the next chapter to see what research efforts have been made for coping with silence, how silence has been empirically studied, and what outcomes have been made available to us.

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Trends in Silence Research

The concept of silence research in this chapter refers to studies that nurture silence as well as those that hinder it. Being a highly debatable construct, silence is subject to both appreciation and disapproval, with diverse nuances in between. In an ideal world, we identify useful silence to employ it as an asset and we identify useless silence to remove it as a problem. Unfortunately, some studies are designed to remove silence at any cost without distinguishing whether it is useful or useless. To a mind that favours the spoken word, a silent person is an unskilful person, with a muffled voice and a brain too slow for speech. In Bean and Peterson’s (1998) counselling advice, students who do not participate in class might need to be brought ‘to an office conference where the instructor can speak honestly about the problem’ and through supportive coaching, hopefully, these ‘students may begin to make small steps towards progress’ (p. 39). This scenario depicts the silent student as an offender who disrupts classroom learning and thus needs psychotherapy. Such resolution, unfortunately, fails to reflect the complex reality of how silence functions. This is because there are numerous ways of being silent, just like there are numerous ways of using speech. If we sometimes recognise individuals whose silence indicates incompetence, we can identify characters whose talkativeness indicates incompetence as well. It would be unfair to insist that one behaviour must rank higher than the other in usefulness. Having said that, this discussion does not attempt to shrink the significance of speech in any way. Instead, it provides a critical review of research and draws implications for silence to work effectively alongside speech. To research silence does not mean to eliminate speech from the picture and let silence dominate, considering how these two learning modes cannot exist without each other. To make ELT pedagogy silence-inclusive, lessons are drawn from research in both language learning and the broader discipline of education. Because of its limited scope, the chapter does not aim for numbers by reporting as many research studies as possible but will be highly selective to only extract the essence of silence research. The purpose of this is to identify significant patterns and findings with strong potential for transforming pedagogy. 33

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3.1

How Silence Research Evolves

Although the origin of silence discourse can be traced back to the early interest in inner speech among European philosophers and psychologists in the late nineteenth century (Levelt, 2012; Guerrero, 2018), silence research has become most visible in education since the early 1970s (Sharpley, 1997) with the works of Bugelski (1969), Sokolov (1972), Paivio (1979), Lantoff & Frawley (1985), and John-Steiner (1985a), which investigate mental processing and inner speech. Subsequent exploration by Ushakova (1994), Guerrero (1994), Guerrero and Villamil (1994), and McCafferty (1998) continues to position inner speech in foreign language learning contexts where it sometimes emerges as self-talk. Although the term ‘silence’ seldom appeared in scholarly investigation in these years (the 1970s to mid-1990s), this budding line of studies has established a foundation for understanding what silence encompasses to this day. In the meantime, other scholars such as Jaworski (1992), Scardamalia and Bereiter (1992), O’Keefe (1995), and Jaworski and Sachdev (1998) look into silence beyond L2 contexts, yet their research does offer important implications in language education, especially in understanding the importance of learners’ reflective time and teachers’ reconsideration of overused talk. The legacy of such groundwork work has gradually flourished from the 1970s until recently, growing in humble quantities but with plural diversity. But it was not until the late 1990s and early 2000s that the term ‘silence’ began to make its regular entrance into the scope of many projects. When the theme was broadened from ‘inner speech’ to ‘silence’, researchers also started to cover a wider spectrum of topics than ever before. New topics emerged such as learner reflection (Bao, 2002; Niegemann, 2004; Wuttke, 2012), silent engagement (Obenland, Munson & Hutchinson, 2012), and contemplative pedagogy (Owen-Smith, 2017), among many others. In unprecedented ways, silence research also made novel connections with affect, perception, experiences, cultural traits, physical settings, classroom dynamics and experimentation, task design, assessment innovation, and silence-related pedagogy. Together they form different patterns of development that will be identified in the coming section. 3.2

Overview of Distinctive Trends in Silence Research

Trends in silence research over the past sixty years are highly complex. To make this discussion easier for readers in both comprehending and retaining knowledge, I would like to tell a story as a metaphorical and systematic way of mapping out such complexity. Once upon a time, there was a strange creature living in a dark cave. Although nobody knew what it looked like, everyone was well aware of its existence. One day, a team of explorers set foot in the cave to observe and collect information about the creature.

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But they were not the only ones with curiosity. A second team of explorers arrived at the cave. Some of them were cautious: not trusting the creature, they gathered information to warn people of every conceivable danger. Soon a third team joined them with weapons. Using some information generated by the second team, they decided to assault the creature to capture and place it under control. Unfortunately, they failed because the creature did not allow that to happen. Then a fourth team came up with a different plan: instead of focusing on the creature, as all the other teams had done, they asked the villagers nearby how their lives had been affected by the presence of the creature. With information from the villagers’ opinions, they informed a fifth team, who joined them at last. Being equipped with this knowledge, the fifth team now negotiated with the monster and found ways for it to co-exist with humans in peaceful ways. This method, believe it or not, seemed to bring promising results. The strange creature is silence, with its mystery that calls for explanations. The explorers are academic researchers with their respective views and commitment to pursuing that mystery. The five teams represent five distinctive trends in research, whose views denote various degrees of neutrality, caution, opposition, collaboration, and empathy. It is hard to find another construct in ELT where perspectives merge and clash with such tension and complexity. The chart below (Figure 3.1) summarises such a dynamic in its trends and timelines, coupled with a further explanation underneath.

1970s–present Early-1990s–present Mid-1990s–present Research into the dynamics of inner speech

Mid-2000s–present A quest for the causes of silence

Late 2000s–present Counter-silence interventions

Research into learner and teacher views on silence

Research into productive silence

Informing

Informing

Informing

Figure 3.1 The evolvement of silence research (1970s–2020s)

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The first trend emerged in the 1970s with a focus on inner speech. Adopting a neutral stance, it investigates how silence operates in the mind. This view, however, was confronted by the second trend arising in the 1990s, which negates speech that is inaudible and seeks to know why articulation does not occur. While the first trend perceives silence as a full substance with rich meaning, the second trend views silence as hollowness that needs to be explained. While the former is concerned with what happens inside the mind, the latter cares more about external behaviour. The third trend, which occurred in the mid-1990s, also confronts views from the first trend. It disapproves of silence and embarks on pro-talk experiments, believing that taking learners out of silence equals bringing education forward. Some of these interventions manage to make learners speak more while others experience resistance. A small number of studies, however, are not anti-silence but explore the possibility of expanding learning repertoires. The fourth trend, which emerged in the mid-2000s from a neutral stance, collects the voices of learners and practitioners, either respectively or comparatively. It believes that the right to judge silence belongs to teachers and students while researchers should listen to those voices without prejudice. This line of research has grown popular for its equitable aspiration, rich evidence, and useful knowledge from the classroom. The fifth trend was initiated during the 2010s by a handful of scholars who aspired to take learner voice to pedagogical action. In opposition to the third trend for its anti-silence stance and in harmony with the second trend for its attentiveness towards learner needs, these researchers build pro-silence strategies to liberate learning from heavy reliance on speech. Their efforts are also inspired by the knowledge of inner speech that has been generated since the 1970s by the first trend. The work of this fifth community represents an early attempt to incorporate silence into pedagogy. As elaborated above, these five patterns are not mutually independent but intersect with one another to some degree. For example, research into inner speech and voice (the first and fourth trends) informs pro-silence research (the fifth trend). Research into the causes of silence (the second trend) informs protalk experiments (the third trend). The chapter will now unpack the five trends in a chronological flow, citing representative works from each and commenting on the essence of its contribution. Towards the end, a synopsis of the strengths and weaknesses of silence research will be provided. 3.3

Research into the Dynamics of Inner Speech

Some 2,300 years ago Plato had already identified thought as a kind of speech, that is, ‘the conversation with the soul’ (Sokolov, 1972, p. 34). Early research into inner speech in L2 education was inspired by Vygotskian theory during the

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1960s. Through empirical efforts, Sokolov (1972), John-Steiner (1985a), Ushakova (1994), and Guerrero (1994) have recognised the presence of inner speech in processes such as reading texts, improving language, mental processing, and learning experiences. One important argument developed by this line of research is that when learners listen to speech, they do not just hear but also speak in a quiet dimension. At some point, learners cease to hear the speaker’s words but start hearing their own. Blonskii (1964) calls this the ‘psychic ear’ (p. 452) that allows a natural shift from the exposure to an external voice to the creation of an inward voice. Characterised by its self-directed functioning (Guerrero, 2018), inner speech represents an important tool for using silence. Silence may not take a linguistic form (Vygotsky, 1934/1986) but, when it does, it moves one step forward and becomes private speech (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Such fluidity allows this construct to travel from the abstract to the concrete, serving as a pathway for turning thoughts into words. While elusive inner speech may not reach the level of conscious awareness (Marvel & Desmond, 2012), robust inner speech can emerge into a conversation. Tomlinson (2020) highlights that the use of inner speech and private speech can be strongly connected to external speech. Silent engagement, arguably, can easily go undetected by the teacher as it stays covert and inaudible. However, researchers have managed to bring such commitment to a visible surface. For example, Guerrero (2004), through collecting learners’ self-reports, discovers that the use of inner speech includes silent repetition of L2 input, playback of input for reflection, planning output, and imagining conversations. Research by McCarthy-Jones and Fernyhough (2011), DaSilveira and Gomes (2012), and Tomlinson (2020) reveals how inner speech can foster problem-solving skills, construct dialogues in the mind, and perform a wide range of L2 processing functions. By revealing learners’ internal efforts, this line of research unpacks the complex process from thought to speech and proves that silence can be strategically monitored. Such dynamics are captured in the chart below (Figure 3.2). Visualising this continuum is helpful for language teaching as it raises the awareness that the inner voice, once well nurtured, has the potential to build L2 output. In this process, the inner voice performs a wide range of rehearsal

Non-linguistic thought (sensory, imagery, etc.)

Inner speech (inner voice)

Private speech (self-talk)

Insider speech (brief whispering of ideas to peers)

Figure 3.2 The continuum of thought and speech

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Public speech (verbal participation)

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functions that benefit language learning (Tomlinson, 2003a), especially when learners are confronted by highly demanding tasks such as seeking a solution (Sokolov, 1972) or processing a difficult text (Ridgway, 2009). Figure 3.3, which is inspired by Guerrero’s (2004) and Tomlinson’s (2020) research on inner speech/the inner voice, unpacks a range of L2 processing functions that the mind is capable of performing. This list of functions, however, is far from complete. Research evidence consistently confirms that the degree of task challenge plays a role in stretching inner speech to private speech (Frawley & Lantolf, 1985; Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; McCafferty, 1998). Viewed by Vygotsky (1934/1986, p. 39) as an ‘instrument of thought’, inner speech can transform intrapersonal functions into an interpersonal experience. Such psycholinguistic knowledge is valuable for creative pedagogists who wish to seek ways of helping learners move along the continuum of thought and speech, as demonstrated in Figure 3.2.

Repetition of L2 input Input playback for reflection

Speeding up speech in the mind

Imagined conversation

Elliptical and egocentric utterances INNER SPEECH (the inner voice) Making comments to self

Problem-solving practice

Reasoning to oneself

Planning output Making contextual references

Figure 3.3 Some functions of inner speech

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3.4 A Quest for the Cause of Silence

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A Quest for the Cause of Silence

Although the expression ‘the cause of silence’ seems to appear widely in the literature, I tend to resist this word choice. This is because, in my inspection of the term used in a few hundred examples from the media, most nouns following ‘the cause of’ often carry negative meanings. Some examples are the cause of death, the cause of attacks, the cause of physical difficulty, the cause of divorce, the cause of suicides, the cause of disease, the cause of slow progress, the causes of failure of the Crusades, the cause of increased cost of telegraphic services, the cause of nullity between Catholics, the cause of railway accidents, the cause of quarrel between Great Britain and France in Tahiti, the cause of his defeat in the general election, the cause of the torsion of the Gastropod body, the causes of errors, the cause of decadence, the causes of the collapse of the kingdom, the causes of mechanical stress, the causes of the Sioux outbreak, the causes of the financial embarrassments, among hundreds of other sentences that use ‘the cause’ and ‘the causes’ in a destructive light. It seems difficult to find positive wording such as the cause of love, the cause of happiness, the causes of achievements, the causes of a wonderful life, and so on. When an empirical project sets out to investigate the causes of silence, that project is prejudiced because it has already prepared a finding before the search: silence is unwanted and needs to be removed. Putting word choice aside, let us look at the discourse on where negative silence derives from. The second trend in research seeks explanations for learner resistance to speech. While some scholars perceive silence as an inhibitor to learning, others keep a neutral stance towards silence. The reasons for speech inhibition fall into four categories, namely linguistic, cultural, socio-psychological, and academic dimensions, as shown in Figure 3.4. There are cases in which many studies of a similar design reach the same finding, such as those stating that East Asians are silent because they grow up in societies that value silence. When this happens, the same outcome can be supported by several dozen references but, to save space, only a few names are included. Linguistic Dimension Learner struggle to participate in classroom discussion stems from low confidence due to self-perceived inferior language proficiency. This finding is drawn from studies by Lee (2009), Choi (2015), and Kim (2016) on Korean students in the United States, MacIntyre and Gardner (1994a, 1994b) and MacIntyre, Noels, and Clément (1997) on international students in Canada, and Karas and Faez (2020) on Chinese students in Canada.

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LEARNER SILENCE

LINGUISTIC DIMENSION

CULTURAL DIMENSION

SOCIOPSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION

ACADEMIC DIMENSION

Figure 3.4 Dimensions of learner silence

Cultural Dimension When learners move from a society where silence is a natural part of communication to another society where talk is the norm, silence becomes problematic in the eyes of the host party. This understanding comes from research by Liu (2002) on Chinese students in the United States, Tani (2005) on Asian international students in Australia, Nakane (2006) on Japanese students in Japan and Australia, Lee (2009) and Choi (2015) on Korean students in the United States, King (2011) on students in Japan, Wang (2011) on Chinese students and international teachers, A. T. H. Nguyen (2002), T. H. Nguyen (2002), and Yates and Nguyen (2012) on Vietnamese students, Santosa and Mardiana (2018) on Indonesian students, and Reid and Trofimovich (2018) on Chinese students in the United States.

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Socio-psychological Dimension Learners suffer from fear of public judgement that leads to anxiety and unwillingness to communicate. This knowledge is learned from studies by Howard, James, and Taylor (2002) in classrooms in the USA, Kim (2013) on Korean students in the USA, Gallagher (2013) on Chinese students in the UK, Mystkowska-Wiertelak and Pawlak (2014) in classrooms in Poland, and MacIntyre and Gardner (1994a, 1994b) in classrooms in Canada. Poor socialisation and power imbalance also contribute to learner refraining from verbal interaction in the classroom. Poor socialisation occurs as a result of formal social conditions in the classroom and limited contact outside of it. This phenomenon is observed in studies by Steinberg and Horwitz (1986) on Spanish learners of ESL in the United States as well as Weaver and Qi (2005) and Auster and MacRone (1994) in various American classroom contexts. Power imbalance in classroom relationships is created by differences in language competencies, as revealed in a study by Peirce (1995) on international students in Canada; challenges in social communication, as identified in research by research by Turnbull (2019) on Spanish-speaking students in the United States; and intimidation caused by white and masculine dominance, as discussed in a study by Coombs, Park, and Fecho (2014) on Korean students in the United States. Academic Dimension Silence may come from conventional seating arrangements (Fadilah, 2018), which position the teacher as the authority and main interlocutor for students to speak to. Other factors that influence learner silence are negative feedback (Yashima, MacIntyre & Ikeda, 2018) and the cognitive challenge of verbal participation due to classmates who seem more eloquent (Syed & Kuzborska, 2020). These findings derive from research in various contexts such as Indonesian classrooms (Fadilah, 2018), Japanese classrooms (Yashima, MacIntyre & Ikeda, 2018), and Pakistani classrooms (Syed & Kuzborska, 2020). Overall, some of the causes of silence in this section can be managed by modified pedagogical efforts while others seem more difficult to be got under control, a capacity that will be discussed in Chapter 4. 3.5

Counter-Silence Interventions

The third trend comprises interventional experiments in the classroom, which became abundant in the 1990s, to convert silence to talk. They fall into two main categories, rule-based interventions and resource-based interventions.

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The former introduces new classroom regulations for learners to follow. The latter brings novel elements to classroom processes to influence learner behaviour. Below is an example of a rule-based intervention. In 2015, I observed a class at an Australian university where half of the students were highly eloquent Anglo-white extroverts while the other half were silent East Asian introverts. Being worried about imbalanced participation, the two lecturers who co-taught this class decided to conduct an experiment to amend this. They brought coffee stirrers to the class, which they called ‘participation sticks’, and distributed three of them to each student. With this, they set the rule that every student would need to contribute three times during the lesson. Every time someone spoke, they would return one stick to the lecturer. The aim of this arrangement was for everyone to take an equal amount of talking turns. The experiment worked but not without a major side effect. For the first five minutes, all the white students finished their sticks and sat there feeling distressed at not being allowed to talk anymore. The East Asian half of the class then slowly participated while experiencing the pressure of verbal responsibility for the rest of the lesson. On the surface, the intervention achieved its intended goal of balancing talking turns, yet deep down students were emotionally unstable. They found the lesson process stressful when learning modes were bent against everybody’s will. Tension occurred between classroom rules and student needs because, although the rule took effect, the need was not satisfied. Besides, the class discussion was unnatural as some students with burning ideas to share were silenced, while others with little to say had to fabricate contributions. Participation, after all, did not happen by choice but through authoritative reinforcement. It seemed that the new rule made lecturers, not students, feel happy as the strategy served teaching rather than learning. The above incident, random as it seems, mirrors a common approach of classroom experiments that strive for verbal participation. Many interventions craft new assessment rules as a motivational strategy. In a study by Reinsch and Wambsganss (1994), for example, students who participate have their scores added to take-home essay examinations. In another experiment by Boniecki and Moore (2003), every time students contribute, they receive a token to be exchanged for credit points. These studies focus on increasing the quantity of speech while overlooking learners’ emotions and individual needs. This design often results in ambivalent outcomes, that is, mixed responses. While some students contribute more intensively, others switch off from participation as their mental processing practice is downplayed. Such predicaments are found in experiments by Hodge and Nelson (1991), Reinsch and Wambsganss (1994), Boniecki and Moore (2003), Sommer and Sommer (2007), and Foster et al. (2009), among others. The credit system benefits highly verbal students the most while introverts suffer from lower marks. Such weighing of student

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performance has been criticised for contaminating course objectives as it reduces students’ genuine learning passion to numerical merits (Jacobs & Chase, 1992). The second type of intervention reverses the above situation by introducing one or more elements into the classroom process to inspire verbal interaction. Examples of such elements are teacher nomination, learner preparation, social network, group cohesiveness, improvement of classroom climate, selfassessment, wait time, and teacher silence, among others. Although some studies still include grades in the process, they make sure that grading is not the only source of motivation. Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt’s (2006) intervention incorporates a combination of teacher nomination, awarded grades, learner preparation, peer rapport, and a positive classroom atmosphere to facilitate natural participation. In another experiment by the same team two years later, Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt (2008) achieve enthusiastic participation from students by combining public speaking presentations with self-report and selfawarded marks. In these studies, it is learner autonomy and self-control that make a difference in how students prefer to participate. Classroom studies by Alcón (2002), Mackey, Oliver, and Leeman (2003), and Sato and Ballinger (2016) reveal that trying to improve interaction by working with classmates elicit more meaningful and natural speech than doing so with the teacher. It is because while the teacher interacts pedagogically, such as by reformulating and evaluating learner speech, classmates employ more requesting strategies, such as asking for information and elaboration. Thus, interventions with a focus on genuine socialisation tend to produce superior outcomes to those with a focus on remedial teaching alone. Having said this, teachers do not have to be excluded from attempts to improve social interaction in the classroom if they are willing to occasionally step away from their pedagogical role to act as conversation partners. Along this line, Yashima, MacIntyre, and Ikeda’s (2018) twelve weeks’ experiments in a Japanese university classroom introduce an unconventional class process that achieved a positive outcome. In every lesson, the teacher spends twenty minutes retreating from talk to open up space for a free conversation with students. The classroom atmosphere changes dramatically when the interaction becomes more social than formal. A large-scale experiment by King et al. (2020) with 900 learners in 30 classrooms at several Japanese universities promotes group cohesiveness through out-of-class social activities including dinner, karaoke, bowling, and picnic events that are organised by students. As a result, learner anxiety is mitigated, social embarrassment is reduced, and participation becomes less stressful. Approaching learners as complex individuals with social and emotional needs, these projects show more care about learning quality than collecting speech. When pedagogy moves beyond grades and into more humanistic factors, it provokes naturalistic responses and enjoys

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RULE-BASED INTERVENTION

• Treating all learners the same • Using grades as motivation • Pragmatic reinforcement of rules • Technical learning process

Ambivalent outcomes

RESOURCE-BASED INTERVENTION

• Treating learners as individuals • Respecting social, emotional needs • Using new resources in natural settings • Humanistic learning process

Positive outcomes

Figure 3.5 Two types of classroom experiments

a better chance of success. The contrast between rule-oriented and resourceoriented interventions is mapped out in Figure 3.5. 3.6

Research into Learner and Teacher Views on Silence

The fourth trend, which documents learner and practitioner views on silence, raises the awareness of whom silence serves. Research evidence shows that some teachers care about learner preferences while other teachers, on the contrary, insist on a more verbal discussion to make teaching easier. Challenge occurs in mutual expectation because when learners are quiet, they know exactly what they are doing but their teachers do not. These findings come from Jaworski and Sachdev’s (1998) study of Welsh students’ beliefs and attitudes about silence, and Bao & Thanh-My’s (2020) study of 239 Vietnamese university students’ self-perception of silent learning. This line of research discloses what learners want that is often hidden in the discourse. It shows that many students proactively develop quiet learning strategies to prepare for participation. One example of such a strategy is to combine learner experiences with teacher input for building ideas. Some students wish that the teacher were aware of this need and would expand upon students’ experiences for class discussion. They also prefer to be challenged by controversial and debatable topics. Caring about content quality, they often feel upset when the teacher does not know this but keeps class discussion superficial by letting thinking-aloud, talkative students dominate conversations. These findings are drawn from a study by Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt (2004) on fifty-four college students in a communication class. To some learners, silence is a choice whereby one would benefit more through listening than speaking. Those who are intellectually advanced and self-confident do not have high regard for active oral participation in the

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classroom, a positioning that is often misinterpreted by some teachers as low ability and low confidence. This insight is drawn from King (2013a, 2013b) on Japanese students’ self-perceived experience with silent learning. Such preferences for silent learning, however, are not unique to East Asian students. Research conducted by Reda (2009) on American students and by Bao (2014) on Australian students reveals that many Caucasian students’ best learning moments occur through listening and self-reflection while excessive encouragement towards verbalisation results in insufficient thinking space. Another case study by Tsui and Imafuku (2020) on Japanese students reveals that if students already feel that their silent learning is beneficial for them, any effort to make them speak out regularly would not be perceived by them as useful. Taken together, these findings show that some of the reasons for learner silence remain largely unknown to teachers. Learner silence resembles an iceberg whose tip is more visible than what stays underneath (Figure 3.6). From a pedagogical perspective, research reveals that experienced teachers tend to develop more sensitivity and understanding towards students’ diverse ways of using silence compared with novice teachers who often jump to the conclusion that silence denotes weaknesses (Ollin, 2008; Vassilopoulos & Konstantinidis, 2012). The concepts written inside the iceberg are drawn from research discourse; to reduce the cumbersome citations, references are

Figure 3.6 The iceberg of learner silence

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not included here but will reoccur throughout this book and will be recorded in the content index at the end of the volume. When it comes to teacher perception of learner silence, research findings are sometimes contradictory. While some teachers treat silence as a pleasure, others view it as trouble. For example, in Ollin’s (2008) study, twenty-five teachers being interviewed in the UK maintain that learner silence is a productive resource and thoughtful learning. In the meantime, in Coplan et al.’s (2011) study, the majority of 275 Canadian elementary school teachers believe learner silence reflects lower intelligence and poor performance. Some teachers who disapprove of silence would not hesitate to make generalising negative comments about silent students. For example, they explain that weak, quiet students are weak because they are silent but argue that weak, articulate students are weak because of the disruption by others. For these teachers, silence is the source of all failure. When teacher beliefs are biased against silent students and when the researcher does not evaluate such views, data then become findings that distort objective reality. The study by Coplan et al. (2011) shows a case in point. To compensate for such discriminatory outcomes, a small number of studies make efforts to investigate more than one view on silence, that is, seeking a comparative stance. Bao’s (2002) study reveals a misunderstanding coming from teacher and learner beliefs. While some teachers feel frustrated by what they assume to be students’ traditional silent habit and unwillingness to participate, their students are frustrated by what they assume to be teachers’ traditional lecturing habit and unwillingness to welcome participation. Another study by Harumi (2011) reports tension between students’ opposing views on silence. Misunderstanding occurs when native English-speaking peers interpret Japanese peers’ silence as a sign of disinterest while the latter keep silent because they need guidance to participate. These findings are eye-opening because they expose the reason why silence easily becomes misunderstood, which is seldom discussed in the discourse. It seems that, for research to be convincing, researchers need to explore a balanced perspective by gathering more than one view. In other words, collecting teacher views or learner views alone risks producing single-sided outcomes that might further contribute to the misinterpretation of silence. In one rare positive case study, teachers are acutely aware of the need not to be biased against silent students. Vassilopoulos and Konstantinidis’s (2012) survey of ninety-six primary school teachers in Greece documents teachers’ thoughtfulness and shows that teachers do not jump to a conclusion about the value of silence since they care about students’ feelings. Instead, whether the teacher employs teaching silence depends largely on how it affects students on a case-by-case basis. For example, silence is used with students who are sensitive to criticism to avoid hurting their feelings. In the meantime, silence

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3.7 Research into Productive Silence

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is not used with students who are self-critical and who do not feel well connected to the teacher. Most teachers in this study admit that they had to learn to use silence through trial and error because silence is seldom a topic in teacher education programmes. These studies go well with ethnographic research that highlights the complexity of silence as being subject to tension, misunderstanding, and power reproduction (Gilmore, 1985). 3.7

Research into Productive Silence

The fifth trend, which benefits from the first trend’s research into inner speech, examines productive silence by taking on three responsibilities: to confront the marginalisation of silence, to advocate a pro-silence stance, and to document classroom practice that utilises silence. These actions form a route of progression as demonstrated in Figure 3.7. Although this structure is not explicitly stated in any research design, it can be inferred through dissecting the content of various projects. 3.7.1

Confronting the Marginalisation of Silence

Researchers challenge pedagogical practices that exclude silence from classroom processes. Studies by Scardamalia and Bereiter (1992), O’Keefe (1995), Bao (2002), Niegemann (2004), and Wuttke (2012) point out teachers’ overuse of questioning that rushes for the answer without leaving space for thought processing. A survey by Jaworski and Sachdev (1998) on 319 secondary students in Wales discovers that without sufficient thinking time students suffer from poor absorption of new learning materials and underdeveloped reflective skills. Such suppression of silence also derives from peers. A study by Yi (2020) on silent Asian international students in the US higher educational context shows that many students resist being intimidated by excessive talk from classmates. International students perceive many American peers as making casual participation ‘without deep thoughts’ (p. 9), arrogantly displaying common or lowquality knowledge, and stubbornly claiming their views without sufficiently listening.

To confront the marginalisation of silence

To advocate productive silence

Figure 3.7 Tasks for investigating productive silence

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To document classroom practice that utilises silence

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3.7.2

Advocating a Pro-silence Stance

Researchers advocate learner agency with productive silence in mind. Shuttleworth (1990), for example, documents students’ yearning for the freedom to decide when they can study alone and when they wish to join the class discussion. The same project records students’ suggestions to make class discussion more effective by reducing teacher interference with learning engagement. Another study by Obenland et al. (2012) on 434 students in chemistry classes highlights students’ view of silent engagement as an active form of participation. Besides academic needs, empirical evidence indicates that helpful practice of silence can benefit students’ emotional and cognitive development (Davidson & McEwen, 2012), self-compassion, creativity (Napora, 2013), attention control, affective awareness, cognitive function, and social behaviour (Owen-Smith, 2017). 3.7.3

Documenting Classroom Practice That Utilises Silence

This task represents the most important goal of the fifth trend. Classroom practice of productive silence occurs in two dimensions, learning and teaching. From a learning perspective, silence has been connected with task design, visual imaging, inner speech, emotions, sounds, mental-processing speed, multi-sensory engagement, and linguistic output. Bao’s (2020b) case study of East Asian students in an Australian university discovers that some students employ silence as engagement when it comes to cognitively demanding tasks. In Tomlinson’s (2011) experiment with one hundred proficient readers who use a variety of texts, the majority report forming visual images of the texts as a way of connecting reading with their life experiences. Other studies also demonstrate readers’ experience with sounds and feelings from exposure to descriptive and narrative texts (Bugelski, 1969; Paivio, 1979; Stevick, 1986; Arnold, 1999; Tomlinson & Avila, 2007a). Such responses serve as ways of compensating for pre-mature linguistic ability (Tomlinson, 2011) and building greater engagement in the learning process (Avila, 2005). From a teaching perspective, researchers have documented self-reported data from teachers in Greece, Japan, England, India, Russia, Australia, and other contexts that show the intentional practice of silence as pedagogy. Vassilopoulos and Konstantinidis’s (2012) study of ninety-six primary school teachers in Greece demonstrates teachers’ allocation of silent time for students to assimilate learning materials and for teachers to refrain from untimely criticism of student learning. Harumi (2020) through conversation analysis discovers that a combination of teachers’ wait time, encouraging attitude, and helpful eliciting skills can maximise students’ learning potential. Das and Sharma (2016) report strategic use of silence at an Indian international school

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where teacher talk is reduced to a minimum through increased visuals, gestures, worksheets, concise speech, and written instructions on PowerPoint. Olga, Zoya, and Irina’s (2016) research into the teaching practice of eighteen university lecturers in Russia reveals four strategies, namely silence in reflective and creative tasks, silence to attract attention to important information, silence for discipline and concentration, and silence for students’ connection of lesson content to their own experiences. Studies of this type are few in the discourse at the moment. What seems worth admiring is that these teachers do not wait for the silence expert to tell them what to do but take the initiative to move ahead of their time. Such use of pedagogical silence in the classroom, which is rarely recorded in the silence debate, represents an extremely promising area for ELT pedagogists to examine. 3.8

Achievements and Weaknesses in Silence Research

Silence research over the past five decades has made three significant contributions to education including ELT. They include profound knowledge of silence, a sophisticated portrayal of the silent learner, and a diversity of research scopes. • Knowledge of silence expands with the inclusion of inner speech/the inner voice, visualisation, text processing, mental processing, and cognitive engagement, among others. These constructs form a sense of learner agency in using silence to keep track of learning rather than lose sight of it. • The silent learner is portrayed as having the ability to perform multiple ways of being silent that are as diverse as ways of speaking. With empirical evidence that silent learners are far from a homogeneous community of vocally disabled people who need help, any over-simplified perception that puts down the reflective learner is out of date and needs to change. • Research scopes are expanded with many creative perspectives and focuses, including the need for silence to serve learning rather than teaching (Jaworski & Sachdev, 1998), the use of social networks in mitigating the tension between reflective and articulate students (King et al., 2020), learnerdriven strategies to boost discussion quality (Dallimore et al., 2004), silence as a choice (King, 2013b), and silence literacy for Anglo-white students to balance their learning repertoires (Ollin, 2008; Reda, 2009; Bao, 2014), among others. Despite such achievements, silence research is subject to three limitations: low respect for learners, the fulfilment of researcher prophecy, and the prioritisation of quantity over quality of learner participation. • Learners are disrespected when their mental processing need is excluded through unfair experiments that put grades at the centre of motivation. The cases in point are classroom interventions reported by Reinsch and

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Wambsganss (1994), Boniecki and Moore (2003), Sommer and Sommer (2007), and Foster et al. (2009). • Some experiments are conceived to satisfy the researcher’s belief rather than to gather fair-minded evidence. Research conducted by Steinberg and Horwitz (1986), Boniecki and Moore (2003), Canary and MacGregor (2008), and Gallagher (2013) are examples of this positioning. • Some studies prioritise quantity over quality of participation without considering learner affect and learning impact. Although verbalisation increases, classroom contributions are irrelevant and ‘consume valuable class time’ (Sommer & Sommer, 2007, p. 6). Some examples are experiments reported by Hodge and Nelson (1991), Reinsch and Wambsganss (1994), Boniecki and Moore (2003), Sommer and Sommer (2007), and Foster et al. (2009). 3.9

The Paucity of Research on the Silent Period

Being a hypothesis rather than a model, the silent period is characterised differently by different scholars. While some perceive it as a low-level processing stage with brief, unnatural imitation of utterances (Krashen, 1985), others observe that learners’ early silence can be connected to the inner voice and can be an active stage in language learning (Tomlinson, 2001b). Although most scholars have eventually agreed on the value of the silent period as a natural part of language development, research in this area, which includes mostly case studies, remains modest in number and does not bring settled or consistent outcomes. For example, the length of the silence period has not been clearly explained in relation to what conditions govern them. This period has been assumed to last a couple of weeks (Gibbons, 1985), one month (Clarke, 1997), a few months (Dulay et al., 1982; Krashen & Terrell, 1983), and forever (Brown, 2002). A survey by Gibbons (1985), which measures the length of early silence in forty-seven young L2 learners in Australia, captures this stage as ranging from 0 to 56 days. Another ethnographic case study by Bligh (2014) of four quiet young children reveals that language is not absent during the silent period. Instead, audible language is substituted by non-verbal language such as facial expressions, gestures, gaze, and eye movements. Although the children in this study do not speak, they indeed do listen, understand, and communicate. While being silent from the spoken word, they are by no means silent from communication. Here one question arises: should the silence period be identified solely by the absence of words, or should it be seen as the absence of words and communication altogether? In other words, are children considered silent when they are non-verbally communicating? Another surprising feature of the silent period, as drawn from empirical evidence, is that it does contain utterances. A project by Saville-Troike (1988)

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on children’s use of private speech is an example of how the silent period is employed in individual ways. It reports how L2 children who go through the silent period use it as an opportunity to engage in private speech. These studies by Bligh and Saville-Troike indicate that the silent period does not contain only silence and but also the emergence of gestures and private speech as additional ways (apart from mental processing) of making this stage more useful. What we are also less aware of is the body of research in the 1970s that examined children’s early silence, including the work of Sorensen (1972), Kohn and Rosman (1972), Gary (1975), and Postovsky (1977), to name a few. These studies, which took place a decade before the silent period concept was coined, discovered that young children who learn a second language often experience an extended silent stage when the L2 environment does not provide sufficient conditions for natural language acquisition. Such lack of L2 exposure, however, does not necessarily mean that children suffer from nonreadiness for speaking. Instead, many teachers keep children aware that early L2 participation is non-obligatory (Granger, 2004; Ellis & Shintani, 2013). As far as the L2 silent period is concerned, research by Yamat, Fisher, and Rich (2013) reveals that young children’s early silence in the mother tongue may occur as a result of observation needs rather than low L1 proficiency. Although we recognise the silence period in both the first and the second languages as an inherent, natural part of the language development process, there remains so much that we do not know about this construct. In visualising the development of this area in its early days, Gibbons (1985) recommended conducting largescale surveys of young children and older learners across contexts to gather more generalisable data on the lengths and patterns of L2 use in the silent period. This appeal, unfortunately, has barely been responded to by researchers and thus empirical studies in this direction seem to be unheard of. 3.10

Concluding Insights

The development of silence research is filled with complexity whereby tension occurs not only between the trends but also within each trend and even within every construct in it. For instance, the intervention design within the third trend is divided into two opposing types, with one being technical and the other humanistic. The positioning of teachers’ voices within the fourth trend splits into two contradictory views, with one being pro-silence and the other antisilence. Besides, communication among researchers within the second trend remains so inadequate that many keep reproducing the same design and the same finding, as when several dozen projects about Asian silence repeatedly point to learners’ cultural origin as the sole explanation of their behaviour. Silence research is also characterised by instability in its theoretical evolvement. In particular, the field does not evolve from less to more understanding

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but in many cases moves backwards. For instance, after scholars in the 1970s had already shed light on many productive functions of silence, many scholars in the 1990s disregarded such findings and approached silence as a mere lack of competence. Besides, a major construct such as the silent period has been shaped by controversy and complication. In many cases, knowledge about silence not only progresses but also backslides, making it difficult for it to be seen as a logical debate. No other construct in ELT has experienced such a high extent of the conceptual crisis. This chapter has not simply reviewed the literature on silence but has critically systematised the essence of silence research and weighed its impact on language education. In particular, it has evaluated the usefulness of designs and findings from silence studies with the potential for transforming pedagogy. In doing so, the chapter has addressed the questions of what efforts have been made and what knowledge has been produced, during fifty years of silence research, to inform ELT pedagogy. As a continuation, the next chapter will answer the extended question: in what way can such knowledge be applied to moving ELT pedagogy forwards?

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4

Elements That Shape Pedagogy for Silence

4.1

Understanding the Association between Silence and Speech

Both speech and silence host the formulation of ideas. However, these two modes do not perform this task independently but do so on an inter-related and turn-taking basis. Such movement is important not only in communication but also in teaching as the two gears that support student learning. Some teachers, however, routinely spend too long in one gear and not enough in the other as they fill class time with excessive verbalisation. It would be misleading to credit all kinds of classroom interaction solely to the presence of speech, which would be the same as marvelling at the palette of ocean ripples without exploring its depth. A competent teacher must know that student learning comes from both the process of thinking and the delivery of thoughts. To assist that, teachers should pay attention to the aim and timing of their pedagogical decisions to speak and to stay quiet. This chapter argues that the teacher’s decision to shift between silence and speech is a fundamental skill in pedagogy, which does not happen naturally but needs practice to be effective. According to Vygotsky’s theory of verbal self-regulation (1962, 1978 in Manning & Payne, 1996), human communication does not always move from internal thought to external speech but may happen in the opposite direction. That is, not everyone thinks first and then speaks out their opinion, but some people do speak first and think about their words later. The evidence of this is that sometimes we make a comment and then regret having delivered it. To avoid frequent regret, some people choose to be careful with words. Scholars such as Vygotsky (1934/1986), Akhutina (1978), and Dolya (2010) believe that the advanced mind tends to relocate its operation from external expressiveness to the inner space. The quality of being economical with words, or the absence of verbal wastefulness, makes someone a sophisticated communicator so that every time they open their mouth and speak, every word carries special weight that draws attention. An American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), once wrote: I fear a Man of frugal Speech I fear a Silent Man Haranguer – I can overtake Or Babbler – entertain 53

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Elements That Shape Pedagogy for Silence But He who weigheth – While the Rest Expend their furthest pound Of this man – I am wary I fear that He is Grand

Being simple but powerful, the poem reminds one that it is the appropriate deferral of speech that yields an impact on the coming utterance. In Thailand and other Buddhist countries, silence training – that is, spending an extended period in a temple and refraining from all public dealing – has been practised since ancient times as a way of sharpening the mind and refining virtues. The well-cultivated manner that contributes to intellectual and spiritual selfdevelopment also applies to education to some extent. Imagine a classroom process where the teacher and students allocate a specific time to being thoughtful with words. At that moment, verbalisation might drop in quantity but rise in quality. Arguably, a mindful communicator should be in control of knowing when to ponder on the internal word and when to release it externally. In Manning and Payne’s (1996) observation, the shift from interpersonal communication to intrapersonal reflection is often more cyclical than linear: Throughout life, as we interact with others, especially when learning in a new area of study, we move from what we bring uniquely to the learning situation (intra), to what we learn from somewhere else (inter), back to how we internalize this information for ourselves (intra), to how this internalized knowledge impacts on future social transactions (inter). (p. 78)

This awareness shows a two-way fluidity of how communication improves. It is not that the more one speaks, the better communication will become. Instead, skilfully monitoring both thinking and speech processes would create a pleasant impression by avoiding random thought and behaviour. This strategy would work particularly well in teaching, which is the art of attentively managing the learning of others. As Szesztay (2004) maintains, regular reflecting practice allows well-controlled pedagogy. It is teacher reflection and verbal self-regulation that build a bridge between every teacher’s internal sensemaking and their actions (Freeman, 1996). Understanding the movement between talk and silence, that is, knowing when to perform each mode and how much of each is needed, is a delicate decision that proficient teachers need to make, so that teaching does not happen to disrupt learning. Mistakes are made if the teacher keeps silent when students want to hear more clarification, or if the teacher talks excessively when students need more processing time. Achieving the right rhythm in teaching that responds to learning on a moment-to-moment basis would demonstrate the supreme mastery of pedagogy. Such skills, unfortunately, cannot be taught as a technical procedure but require a high level of interpersonal sensitivity, experience in reading student needs, and sophisticated educational expertise.

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Every teacher needs to be responsible for taking this journey by themselves out of love and empathy towards their students. Silence can be useful or useless in learning. Useless silence will be discussed in Chapter 5. This chapter focuses on how useful silence can be created in teaching and learning. It argues that if pedagogy can take control of silence, treat it as a resource, and lead students through its effective use, learning will improve dramatically. As much as good teachers do not leave their students alone to talk among themselves but guide them through meaningful talk, good teachers would do the same with silence through guidance. Neglecting student silence would mean that the teacher is only responsible for classroom learning when students agree to speak; otherwise, they are left to perish on their own. 4.2

Embracing Silence in Pedagogy

This chapter does not suggest that silence should take over speech; neither does it imply that silence should be a dominant part of pedagogy. Most pedagogies have, for a long time, been dominated by overwhelming speech, including the communicative approach, the direct method, task-based language teaching, and audio-lingualism, to name a few. In these traditions, there are hardly any principles, instructions, or strategies that guide learners through thought processing. To make sure that I did not overstate this observation, I looked through thirty books on language teaching and learning to hopefully find some evidence of concern about the use of silence in language development. I studied the index pages of each book in search of ‘silence’ but failed to find it anywhere. It seems that silence has no place throughout over 6,000 pages of extended discussions about diverse ways of developing language proficiency. Having observed L2 learners who have built their English competence largely thanks to silent thinking, I can see that their ways of learning have not been acknowledged and documented by many L2 experts. Non-biased pedagogists might wish to rethink the idea that silence is harmful or useless but consider ways in which silence can be actively employed to boost the quality of thinking and talking. I believe that talk can continue to dominate classroom activity and that there should be more talk than silence in every classroom; but at the same time, it is useful to be more critical of low-quality speech and consider improving it. Such planning of silence in its appropriate pedagogical space is what this chapter is about to recommend. To make that happen, first and foremost, requires teachers to self-regulate the amount and timing of their verbalisation. As educators, we should be able to justify when to verbally assist student learning and when to offer some space for students to optimise their thinking. Besides, it is also important to provide instruction to students on when to reflect and when to speak during the lesson.

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Forcing learners to reflect silently when they wish to speak or making them verbally participate when they need quiet reflection would cause damage to their development system (Bao, 2014). To some introverted students, thinking is equivalent to speaking. According to Bao (2014), talk and silence share such similar productive features in assisting thought processes that the two modes do not have to exclude one another but work collaboratively for mutual merits. Northedge (2003, p. 30) refers to the combination of listening and thinking as ‘vicarious participation’ which brings as much learning benefit as talking. Harumi (2020, p. 54) also views silence as ‘an interactional resource’ rather than a lack of output. As Ridgway (2009, p. 49) observes, ‘thinking in a language provides practice which is arguably as good as speaking it. Processes as important as automatisation continue to operate and one’s proficiency continues to develop.’ Besides verbal interaction, the benefit of mental activities in every individual’s mind needs to be given more attention in classroom teaching and learning (Chastain, 1971; Kyriacou, 1999; Pritchard, 2018). Unfortunately, some teachers have the habit of verbally filling the gap when the class is busy thinking as they feel that the emptiness of sound is a waste of time. Such talk, unless it is significant instruction that guides thinking, might disrupt students’ brain work, especially during cognitively challenging tasks. Students need this mental space to be pure so that they can process information efficiently. If the teacher keeps taking this useful time away from students, it will be very hard for them to practically process anything. Drawn from research by Das and Sharma (2016), good teaching involves a balance between teacher talk and the use of non-speaking support such as visuals, gestures, worksheets, concise speech, and written instructions. In this way, excessive talk is withheld so that verbal intrusiveness can be reduced to a minimum. By removing all potential distractions, the classroom becomes a wholesome place for students’ optimal mental work. In my observation, many teachers subconsciously use low-quality talk to replace fruitful silence. They stop learners from thinking productively and force them to talk meaninglessly. When this happens, tension arises between students’ genuine need for selflearning and the obligation to act out a half-baked contribution as a way of pleasing the ignorant teacher. This chapter falls into four sections. The first part introduces five principles of productive silence based on empirical research into how the mind learns. The second part recommends six strategies for practising meaningful silence as recommended by scholars who have investigated inner-speech processes. The third part proposes a systematic procedure for task design with productive silence in mind, as drawn from my research on learner engagement. Finally, a discussion of pedagogy for online silence is added to the awareness of today’s changing educational context.

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4.3 Five Principles of Productive Silence

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Five Principles of Productive Silence

This section argues that silence becomes productive when the teacher cares about managing the shared space in classroom learning between verbal and less verbal students, in a way that does not marginalise but nurtures the useful functions of silence, by providing the right condition for those functions to occur, by understanding the learning value of mental rehearsal, and by following up on the outcome of such mental rehearsal rather than leaving it alone. These skills work together not only as a procedure but also in a cycle of collaboration and support (Figure 4.1). Each of these steps is conceptualised based on empirical research rather than on mere ideology. 4.3.1

Principle 1: Managing Shared Learning Space

The learning space in every classroom must be well regulated so that it is sensibly allocated to students. This does not mean that everyone should share the same amount of talk. Instead, it would be fair for those who enjoy speaking to have a reasonable amount of verbal time and those who enjoy quietly

Managing shared learning space

Nurturing the functions of productive silence

Providing conditions for productive silence

Following up on the outcome of mental rehearsal

Understanding the learning value of mental rehearsal

Figure 4.1 The productive silence wheel

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processing ideas to have a reasonable amount of thinking time. Tension, however, may occur between extroverted and introverted students. Some verbal students might talk excessively while reflective students are forced to spend most of their time listening. Pedagogy needs to consider the mutual influence between these students and, if need be, encourage them to modify their ways. For example, talkative individuals can be asked to keep quiet for reflective students to process information and share their thoughts. Empirical evidence by Yi (2020) and Bao (2014) reveals that many students become more silent than usual when they feel intimidated by excessive talk from classmates. Studies by Scollon and Scollon (1981) and Losey (1997) also discover that, in many cases, highly articulate classmates talk too quickly and fight so well for their turn that it is extremely hard for their peers to join the discussion. While some students experience the discomfort of having to process the confusing speech of peers (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994a, 1994b), others internalise power relationships and feelings of being discriminated against based on cultural behaviour (Turnbull, 2019). Besides, many students experience a feeling of low respect from the teacher when grades are awarded to speech as a superior way of learning (Hodge & Nelson, 1991). Bao’s (2014) research on peer relationships in educational settings shows that social and reflective students often do not appreciate each other’s strengths. While highly articulate students assume low enthusiasm in their silent classmates, highly reflective students internalise superficiality in their verbal counterparts. Such tension might damage peer rapport, classroom climate, and collaborative effort. In many classrooms, verbal and less verbal learners are often not treated as equals. If both teacher and verbal peers disfavour the introverted mode of learning, that will penalise reflective learners and exhibit an unwelcoming attitude that they do not deserve. Silence-inclusive pedagogy requires teacher sensitivity to the fact that much of learning efficiency is subtly rooted in peer dynamics, which calls for the need to respect the freedom of students to be themselves rather than expecting everyone to behave in the same way. Until recently, the role of teacher behaviour in peer ecology has remained an under-researched area in education (Hendrickx et al., 2016). 4.3.2

Principle 2: Nurturing the Functions of Productive Silence

Productive silence is a concept inspired by the work of Swiss philosopher Max Picard in 1948 (Picard, 1948/2002). It is productive because, as Mostajeran (2019) explains, ‘silence is not a stand-alone entity’ but is ‘an integral counterpart’ of speech (p. 178). According to Wardhaugh (1992) and Jaworski (1993), productive silence comprises a set of skills or functions to be learned and acquired. Useful silence is related to constructs such as attentional processing (Schmidt, 1996; Tomlin & Villa, 1994; VanPatten, 1996), conscious processing

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(Baars, 1988, 1997), mental rehearsal (Saville-Troike, 1988; Guerrero, 1991; 1999; Lantolf, 2000), inner speech (Vygotsky, 1934/1986), the inner voice, (Tomlinson, 2000), introspective self-talk (Morin & Everett, 1990), and internalised speech (Mitchell & Myles, 1998). All of these refer to the same ideology of treating silence as a learning space and using it wisely to produce highquality speech and optimise learning efficiency. Empirical research has disclosed the process of how learners quietly monitor the accuracy and quality of potential output. Output rehearsal is undeniable in language development because it contributes first to proceduralised knowledge and eventually to automatised competency. Much processing towards output is known as mental rehearsal, which according to research by Guerrero (1991) has seven characteristics: ideational (creating thoughts), mnemonic (memorising or retrieving words from memory), textual (organising structure of a text), instructional (applying linguistic rules), evaluative (monitoring and selfcorrecting language), interpersonal (visualising how to talk with others), and intrapersonal (practising inner speech). Other scholars through research efforts have strengthened this awareness by co-constructing the multiple functions of productive thinking (Figure 4.2). This chart is drawn from research by Guerrero (1991, 2005), Tomlinson (2000, 2003a, 2020), Tomlinson and Avila (2007a, 2007b), and Bao (2014) in which the functions have been recorded as some of the most practised strategies in learners’ processing repertoire.

Creating thoughts

Memorising words

Selfcorrecting

Organising structures

Visualising talk with others

Practising inner speech

Applying rules

Paraphrasing and shadowing

Visualising images

Listening to others

Figure 4.2 The multiple functions of productive silence

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4.3.3

Principle 3: Providing Conditions for Productive Silence

Mental rehearsal, which is essential in student learning, may not happen effectively by leaving students alone but needs a supportive environment to nurture it. There are at least six conditions that support the helpful use of silence. They include moderated classroom talk, teacher virtue, teacher fairness, the absence of stress, teacher guidance, and open-ended teaching (Figure 4.3). The first condition, moderated talk, requires a classroom free of peer dominance and heavy teacher control. A positive learning environment is shaped by a range of factors including teachers, classmates, relationships, gender, age, race, social class, instructional style, task quality, and physical comfort, among others (Bao, 2014). For example, a few domineering peers can put off others’ desire to participate. A talkaholic teacher who focuses on giving knowledge much more than eliciting students’ ideas is also uninspiring. The second condition is inspiration coming from the teacher. Humour, modesty, charm, empathy, fairness, and high respect for students are special gifts in the classroom. Since teaching relies largely on inspiration and strategies, the teacher’s thoughtful personality and skilful tactics in organising the right doses of thinking and talking can be powerful sources of learning support. In my past learning experience, I occasionally had a teacher of mundane, boring character who talked excessively and carelessly. The third condition is teacher fairness to everyone. Unfortunately, as research in many Western contexts shows, students who actively participate in class perceive teachers favourably while students who participate less perceive teachers unfavourably (Crombie et al., 2003; Fassinger, 2000). This is because many teachers tend to respond warmly towards verbal individuals, believing that verbal students demonstrate high cooperation. These teachers connect less with their reflective counterparts, treating them with indifference

Moderated talk

Teacher inspiration

Teacher fairness

Absence of stress

Teacher guidance

Open-ended teaching

Figure 4.3 Conditions for productive silence

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and assuming their low enthusiasm. Wood (1996) warns against the false assumption that the amount of learning is connected to the amount of speaking. It would be unfortunate for a class in which half the class and the teacher support constant verbalisation at any cost regardless of the challenge of content and the need to change the learning tone. In such settings, many reflective and thoughtful students become marginalised as they suffer from the experience of educational inequity. The fourth condition is to reduce stress among students. Non-biased teachers with interpersonal sensitivity would learn to adjust their attitude towards the whole class with fairness, for example by not only smiling when receiving student contributions and keeping a cold face towards those who rarely speak. Research by Prentice and Kramer (2006) discovers that some students regularly feel the tension between a desire to participate and a desire to remain silent. If the teacher can feel this and encourage them, these students will be likely to speak. A study by Hansen (2006) demonstrates that language learners develop L2 proficiency best when they feel contented rather than restless and that social constraints have a damaging effect on their language development. This understanding suggests that learners who are forced to behave in ways with which they feel uncomfortable are likely to make slow L2 learning progress as their learning mechanism does not operate naturally. The fifth condition is teacher guidance. According to Hirschy and Wilson (2002), teacher guidance exerts a huge impact on student learning. The teacher needs to tell students the time and the method of mental rehearsal when discussion content becomes cognitively demanding. There should also be an explicit policy for how to follow up on the outcome of students’ mental rehearsal practice, such as a verbal report, whole-class discussion, team sharing, group presentation, and teacher questioning. Such ways of following up need to vary from task to task for variety and to avoid boredom due to predictable routine. The sixth condition is to teach in a way that would open up thinking space rather than focus on knowledge. This includes, for example, discussing debatable issues, inspiring multiple perspectives, inviting explanations, sharing a poem, telling a story without an ending, and giving problem-solving tasks, among others. Along this line, Trahan (2013) suggests that the teacher might sometimes respond to student questions with a question to trigger new thoughts. One of my students once asked me: ‘Why are there so many definitions of creativity? Which one is the best?’ I told him: ‘Do you think we should only have one definition of being creative?’ He thought for a moment and shook his head: ‘No, that would be boring!’ I then commented: ‘I like your reaction.’ By not offering a solution, I let the student use his silence to reflect rather than wait for my answer.

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4.3.4

Principle 4: Understanding the Learning Value of Mental Rehearsal

Mental rehearsal has a strong potential to evolve into self-talk and verbal contribution occurs in highly demanding tasks such as memorising a complex structure, processing new information, reading an advanced text, and solving a problem. Inner speech is effective for maximising the brain’s potential in being fast, elliptical, and free from troublesome efforts such as false starts and syntactic precision (Tomlinson, 2020). Learners employ inner speech to save time from being wasted in thinking aloud. When one thinks actively without speaking out, the grammatical structure of ideas can be abridged rather than extended. They can use simple tenses, the active voice, incomplete sentences, visual images, and so on. Such practice enables quick reflection, speedy decision-making, and preparation for external speech. Drawn from classroom experiments since the 1970s, there is a range of creative methods to make thoughts more accessible or re-visitable. They include retelling (Sokolov, 1972); thinking aloud protocol, whereby learners make a verbal report of their thoughts (Sokolov, 1972; Bowles, 2010); the pursuit of a sound that learners may not fully understand but remember (Krashen, 1983); using both L1 and L2 in processing ideas (John-Steiner, 1985a, 1985b); a dialogue with oneself (Vygotsky, 1934/1986; Tomlinson, 2000); language play, such as repeating words or imitating sentences (Lantolf, 1997); recalling the memory of a previous day (Kim et al., 1997); translation (Price, Green & Studnitz, 1999), shadowing or vicarious response by quietly repeating or responding to someone’s speech (Ohta, 2001); expanding, rephrasing, and editing (Huh, 2002); diary writing (Guerrero, 2004); visualisation of someone else talking to you (Guerrero, 2005); and visual imaging (Tomlinson, 2011), among other helpful schemes. Inner speech practice does not have to happen spontaneously but for optimal efficiency it can be guided through concrete strategies and procedures (Tomlinson, 2020). One example of such a procedure is that learners, first, are exposed to a stimulus (which can be a sound, a flavour, a fragrance, or the feel of an unseen object in a bag) for triggering a thought, an image, or a personal connection. The second step is to express that thought in a drawing. In the third step, the learner can choose between producing a written description of that drawing or articulating the idea to a listener, or both. Inner speech is already existent in every learner’s cognitive system. We do not bring practice to learners but only guide them through diverse strategies to optimise that voice, raise the awareness of its rich potential, and help build confidence in such rehearsal. Since these strategies have been trialled in research that yielded both mental and verbal responses from learners, they are worth keeping as a resource list for task design with productive silence in mind. Instead of trying to force learners to verbalise at any cost while they do not know how, innovative-minded teachers might wish to utilise some of the

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suggestions above as experiential guidance. Besides, textbook writers can exploit any of these to make language learning activities more friendly to silent learners. Teacher development workshops can also use these ideas to involve teacher participants in creating tasks that tap into learners’ inner voices and verbalisation. Such works can be piloted in classroom teaching, and once successful they can be selected and edited to become a handbook for inner speech practice in second language learning. 4.3.5

Principle 5: Following Up on the Outcome of Mental Rehearsal

The teacher might like to make it clear to students that the outcome of productive silence is expected in every activity. This includes when and in what form that outcome is to be presented. Such expectation demonstrates teacher receptivity towards student contribution, without which learning is lost. Research by Bao (2020b) shows the evidence of this. Sayo, a Japanese student, believed that if teachers asked students to think about an issue, they should be able to follow through with that request. Sayo shared an anecdote: During one class, our teacher asked us: ‘What kinds of skills and qualities make a good leader?’ After students tried hard to come up with their responses, one commented that a good leader should care about the opinions of others. The teacher, however, simply acknowledged the contribution without commenting and swiftly moved to the next part of the lesson. From that moment on, I became less passionate about contributing to the discussion topic. (p. 29)

In many cases, not following up on students’ silent processing represents a poor pedagogical decision. Whenever possible, pedagogy should stretch beyond wait time. For example, after the teacher has decided to wait for students to prepare to participate, the outcome of that processing space has to be pursued, such as with teacher comments or in-class discussion. In other words, the way teachers monitor silent learning should be as helpful as the way they monitor talk. Along this line, another study by Dallimore et al. (2004) reports that students greatly appreciate teachers who take students’ ideas and expand upon them, such as by inviting the other students to discuss those ideas. A good teacher would know how to provide a controversial and debatable statement and lead a discussion on the right track by pushing and challenging students to think without letting highly verbal students dominate. 4.4

Learner Strategies in Productive Silence

This section recommends six useful strategies that would enable students to employ silence fruitfully. They include the practice of inner speech, the interaction with resources, the use of scripted speech, personal visualisation as

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inspired by texts, the creation of output from listening, and the need to follow up on what silence produces. 4.4.1

Strategy 1: Practising Inner Speech

Empirical documentation frequently confirms that many students employ inner speech ‘to rehearse linguistic accuracy’ that ‘leads to language output’ and ‘supports the quality of that output’ (Bao, 2014, pp. 146–7). Along this line, Tomlinson (2020) and Tomlinson & Avila (2007b) recommend a range of teaching strategies to assist the productive use of the inner speech/inner voice in L2 classroom contexts: • allowing an initial experience of talking quietly in the mind • going through a problem-solving task in silence by employing inner speech, private speech, visual imaging, drawing, and physical movement • using a mixture of L1 inner voice and an emerging L2 inner voice • building emotional engagement through inspiring topics • mentally reproducing an imagined conversation in a self-selected context • allocating time for silence and speech respectively during classroom processes • repeating in the inner voice L2 utterances heard during class time • writing down the inner speech and sharing it with peers via email communication. There is no doubt about the positive value of learners’ silent talk in foreign language learning, which has been evidenced by research into inner speech, occasionally known as self-talk, that emerged in the 1990s with the works of Ushakova (1994), Guerrero (1994), Guerrero and Villamil (1994), and McCafferty (1992, 1998). Other studies by Jaworski (1992), Scardamalia and Bereiter (1992), O’Keefe (1995), and Jaworski and Sachdev (1998) that investigate silence beyond L2 contexts also offer important implications for the benefit of learners’ reflective time. 4.4.2

Strategy 2: Interacting with Resources

Interaction does not have to be directed towards humans all the time but can be with artefacts, computers, texts, images, facilities, sound, nature, and robots, among others. Cognitive research supports the premise that learning styles are best addressed when methods and resources are varied (Bonwell & Eisen, 1991). Diverse channels of engagement are important for providing a full range of experiences, especially tapping into internal skills such as emotional processing, personal choices, complex judgement, and multiple interpretations. In Cropley’s (2003) discussion of creative teaching, it is through the diversity of resources that teachers can innovate pedagogy. To perceive interaction as only concerning humans represents a narrow view of education.

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Ollin (2008) suggests the use of meta-silence whereby the teacher deliberately discusses the processes of silence. For example, the teacher might like to ask students how much silent time is needed for processing complex ideas such as building a plot for story-writing, project works that require collecting data, making a poster that requires time for refining the design, and so forth. Some examples of creative tasks could be drawing your problem instead of talking about it (such as an image of an entangled bundle of strings that represents life’s complications) and using that visual depiction in an oral presentation. 4.4.3

Strategy 3: Employing Scripted Speech

While words in the mind form internal speech and words spoken out form external speech, words written down to prepare for sharing are known as scripted speech, which is a transition between thought and participation. This transition includes the transcribing of both dialogues and monologues. Scripted dialogues refer to the writing of conversations that mimic real-time communication (Piwek & van Deemter, 2003; Tomlinson, 2020). Scripted monologues, similarly, is the preparation for telling stories or presenting information that imitates natural improvisation. The purpose of such planning is to be in control of what to say and to exclude undesirable features that might occur by mistake. This practice, which is widely used in film scenes, plays, commercials, product demonstrations, and public talks, can be applied to classroom talk. From a learning perspective, scripted dialogues help students increase rehearsal time, diminish the risk of errors, and avoid the pressure of spontaneous responses during an interaction. After the written preparation, learners can show their script to the teacher or peers for feedback. Learners then improve the work before presenting it orally to a partner or the whole class. The process is enriched with learning values as it covers a wide range of skills such as writing, thinking, collaborating, commenting, responding, and editing. This activity also allows both silence and talk to enter into student learning naturally at the right time and in the right dose. If the task of developing an abstract is conducted in only writing, it can be a lonely, boring chore; suppose the task is conducted through speaking only, it would be a hasty performance that may not result in high-quality output. After some time, learners can move to the next stage where dialogues and monologues can be semi-scripted, that is, talk can be delivered from notes so that it sounds more natural than being read aloud. This process can be seen as self-scaffolding whereby learners train themselves to reduce the reliance on scripts and notes when verbally participating. The success of semi-scripted roleplay in improving speech performance has been evidenced through research for assisting learners of mixed proficiency (see, for example, Wiltshier & Honma, 1999; Miranda, 2017).

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4.4.4

Strategy 4: Individual Visualisation As Inspired by a Text

Visualisation, visual imaging (Tomlinson, 2009; van Staden & le Roux, 2010), mental imagery (Pérez-Fabello, Campos & Gómez-Juncal, 2007), and visual imagery (Dijkstra, Bosch & van Gerven, 2017) are thought processes known in many disciplines including language, arts, sciences, and psychology, to name a few. Although these are all useful tools for thinking, they have slightly different focuses. Visual imagery, a familiar concept in neuroscience, refers to the ability to construct a mental representation of what is absent from the visual field to assist reasoning, memorising, and problem-solving. Mental imagery, a common concept in experimental psychology, includes movement and manipulation of images for analytical thinking facility. Visual imaging is the subconscious seeing of images while visualisation is a deliberate and conscious decision to see internally. These distinctions are made to demonstrate a few nuances of how the mind constructs representations. However, owing to the scope of this book, I shall not go further into these areas but focus only on visualisation as a helpful, practical strategy employed by some ELT task designers. In visualisation, learners are encouraged to practise seeing images from texts and from themselves to increase confidence and competence in processing meanings that would benefit L2 learning. Research by Paivio (1979), Dennis (1982), Tomlinson (1997), and Tomlinson and Avila (2007a, 2007b) reveals that learners visualise during reading a text rather than after finishing reading it, although later they can also discuss what has occurred in the mind. This observation means that visualisation can function both as a process and as a product of learning. It is a bridge to problem-solving because, in many cases, demanding immediate verbal responses from students when they are exposed to highly challenging intellectual content encourages low-level processing. Doing that would mean denying learners the opportunity to process meaning. Tomlinson (1997) in his research discovers a remarkable relationship between visualisation and emotional engagement. That is, readers who are emotionally involved in the reading content tend to use more visualisation. For instance, if one’s heart is touched by a poem, it can easily trigger a previous personal experience and bring back a mental image. On the contrary, if someone has no feelings or if the text content seems obscure or pretentious, learners will struggle to build an inner picture. This observation has a special significance in teaching methodology in the sense that text selection needs to contain convincing affective values for learners to be able to respond to what they read. Based on his pedagogical experience and empirical research, Tomlinson (1997; 2009) identifies the following functions as the benefit of visualisation: • to assist the understanding of texts • to aid/strengthen the memory process

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• • • • • •

to enjoy the vividness of text content such as atmosphere and details to remember the layout of a text to add reader creativity to the reading process to evaluate and infer to connect the text with personal experience to facilitate self-talk, that is, saying the text silently in the head, talking to the writer, or talking to oneself. In a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) class at Monash University, I divide my students into four groups. I give everyone a poem and invite these groups to employ four different strategies respectively, which are visualisation, note-taking, self-talk, and interaction. The first group visualises what the poem is about and can draw a picture if they feel like doing so. The second group takes notes of important words to process meaning. The third group talks about the poem to themselves, and the fourth group discusses the poem with peers. This experiment aims to see which approach seems most engaging and enjoyable. Towards the end of the activity, groups one and four (visualisation and interaction) reported various degrees of learning enjoyment while groups two and three (note-taking and self-talk) found their methods quite ordinary. The experience suggests that there is potential for visualisation to produce a learning impact as vibrant as verbal interaction itself. 4.4.5

Strategy 5: Producing Output from Listening

A substantial amount of SLA research has consistently provided the evidence that much of L2 output is consciously and subconsciously constructed on the foundation of L2 input (see, for example, Swain, 1985, 1995; Izumi et al., 1999; Crossley, Kyle & Salsbury, 2016). Putting this understanding into practice, Reda (2009) turns listening into participation by inviting learners, during class discussion, to make sure they frame their comments based on a classmate’s contribution. This arrangement produces a balance between individual contributions and receptivity to other ideas, which allows listening to make up half of participation while verbalisation occupies the other half. Between such moments of receiving input and moments of sharing output, a silent development of ideas would take place among many learners, whether the teacher is aware of this rehearsal or not. Every teacher has three choices: allowing this to happen by giving wait time to students, preventing it by asking students to participate without much thinking, or organising it for optimal efficiency. In one of my classes, I opt for the third choice. Every time a student gives an oral presentation, I give everyone else a slip of paper to write comments on the performance. In this way, while only one person is speaking, some twenty other students are processing ideas to interact silently with that presenter. This model works on a turn-taking basis whereby every student

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has one opportunity to voice their well-prepared ideas for their peers to practise their silence productively. The speaker who receives such written feedback will then process it to assist a written essay that will be submitted as the final assignment. This scenario demonstrates that silent thinking can yield far more output than talking ever does, in both quantity and quality. This model replaces the disproportionate promotion of constant speech in some classroom processes. 4.4.6

Strategy 6: Reporting What Silence Produces

Silence needs an action plan to become productive. The plan is about working towards an intended target. Some examples are thinking of an idea before writing it down, thinking of words to memorise them, and talking to oneself for language practice. Whispering to yourself is perceived by Piaget (1926) as egocentric speech and Flavell (1966, 1996) coined the term ‘private speech’. Similar terminology to this includes vocalised inner speech (Johnson, 2004) and self-talk (Saville-Troike, 2006). The process of moving from inner speech (Tomlinson, 2001b) and inner thought (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, 2004) to virtual silence (not yet social speech) allows a creative facilitator of learning equal to both productive silence and talk. Silence needs to reach an intended outcome and yield a report of that outcome as a learning opportunity for everybody in a classroom. Some examples are quietly seeking a solution to a problem before explaining it to someone or keeping a critical thought to oneself to avoid untimely conflict but taking note of it. After all, the outcome of silence needs to be shared. Silence should not be the learner’s only learning habit but whenever one’s thought seems worthwhile it would be a nice gesture to articulate that idea to support peer learning. Learners should not stubbornly hold on to silence but at times try something different for a change too, such as a thinking aloud technique so they can also hear their voice externally. Sometimes, cognitive thinking, if not of a highly demanding nature, can be coupled with spontaneous talk to refresh the silent space. If some students talk incessantly and waste class time with unusable ideas, students who stay excessively silent might also stiffen the classroom climate with what feels like social distancing. 4.5

A Proposed Model for Classroom Activities

Silence training should be organised for students to practise reflectivity and concentration, produce an outcome, and avoid idle, unproductive moments – in the same way as talk needs to be directed to enhance learning rather than become mere social time in the classroom. The structure of learning will fundamentally change when explicit instruction is provided so that students can employ both silence and talk as learning tools in conscious, informed ways.

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4.5 A Proposed Model for Classroom Activities

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The following model, which is drawn from empirical research on teacher practice and awareness by Bao (2014, pp. 175–6), assists teachers in organising students’ mental rehearsal. It is known as RADAR, which stands for Review – Aim – Direction – Assessment – Reflection (Figure 4.4). To perform each of these steps requires the teacher to address a set of questions to guide the class through a silent-engagement activity. In the end, students will have gathered ideas and language to share with peers and the options for this sharing could be in written, verbal, or reading-aloud form. The model is meant to be applied to teaching practice and classroom activities. Review Are students willing to perform a classroom activity in a little silence? Is the activity cognitively demanding and/or affectively engaging enough to require some silent processing or reflection? Does speech alternate with silence during the activity? When? Aim What is the aim of the activity? What knowledge does the activity generate? What skills does the activity teach? How much silent time should students spend during the activity? Can they also talk if they like?

Review

• Learner readiness for silence • Cognitive demand • Affective engagement • Aim of task

Aim

• Skills • Silence time required

Direction

Assessment

Reflection

• Role of silence • Resources • Teacher guidance • Signs of productive silence • Outcome • Follow up • Learning impact • Teaching efficiency • Challenges

Figure 4.4 A model for productive-silence activities

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Direction What role does silence play? What do students process or reflect on? What linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources do students need to perform this activity? Can they obtain such resources by themselves or do they need teacher assistance? What instruction is given? What does the teacher do to guide students through the task? Assessment How does the teacher judge if learner silence is being used productively? What should be done when the silent time ends? What outcome is expected? How is the outcome shared so that students learn from each other? How should that outcome be evaluated? Who evaluates it, the teacher or students? Does the activity involve rigid or flexible performance? Reflection What do students learn from the experience? What does the teacher learn from the experience? What are some learning and teaching challenges? What evidence demonstrates the success of the activity? How do students feel? What should be done differently next time? This model can be used in three different ways for three different purposes, namely task construction, teaching observation, and classroom research. First, the model can assist activity design when the lesson content is not simple but requires some space and steps to scaffold thinking. Second, the model can be used as an observation scheme to assess the depth of a discussion. Even when all the questions that have silence in them are removed and the discussion does not contain silence anymore, the scheme would continue to work because it asks essential questions about the operational values of every classroom discussion. Third, the model can be used as a framework for experimental research in which cognitive tasks can be conducted in two ways to see if there is any difference in student feedback. For example, the same cognitively demanding activity can be conducted in two different classes. In one class, silence is encouraged and in the other class, silence is not allowed.

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4.6 Recommendations for Teacher Development

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Finally, it is not that the whole activity is to be conducted in complete silence but silence only takes a reasonable portion of the discussion. Depending on how much mental-processing time is needed, silence may vary in the number of instances and lengths, which then need to alternate with speech. While silence may prevail in some activities, speech may dominate in others. This model only serves as a cognition-inclusive tool to assist the quality of speech rather than a design for silence to run over speech. 4.6

Recommendations for Teacher Development Programmes

Teachers are typically trained in verbal pedagogy. We learn to deliver lectures, explain concepts, give presentations, organise discussions, initiate topics, raise questions, articulate feedback, provide compliments, and respond to participation. All these skills are about the spoken word: saying things and receiving what is said. When students practise silent thinking, teachers are mystified. When students need more time, teachers are lost. When students struggle and do not answer a question, teachers are irritated. When students have a reason to resort to silence, teachers see that reason as an excuse. Typical teachereducation programmes coach us to credit everything to the audible word, without which teaching cannot proceed. In many cases, we are educated to misconstrue what learning looks like. Since it is uncommon for teacher education to explore the use of silence, many early-career teachers become frustrated when stumbling upon student silence and see it as a hindrance to instruction. It is essential that teachers develop sensitivities for both timely talk and silent reflection in response to the changing needs and classroom conditions. As a tool for both learning and communication, silence needs to be cognitively useful and socially authentic, that is, functioning well in the classroom as much as it makes sense in the broader social context. Below are some suggestions to introduce silence into teachers’ professional training and development programmes for building, in the words of Hinkel (2006, p. 110), ‘situational relevant pedagogy’. • Teachers reflect on their experience with the use of silence as a teacher, a learner and an observer of student silence. • Teachers read academic articles on silence to discuss various perspectives and connect them with teachers’ views. • Teachers experience and discuss classroom tasks in which silence is part of each task. • Teachers create their tasks in which silence and speech are components. • Teachers can collaborate with ELT scholars to conduct research whereby empirical data may come from teacher perception, student perception, and classroom observation.

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It might be helpful to keep in mind that not all students need silence in the same activity and not all of those who are prone to silence would use it in the same way. Some may process comprehension of learning content in silence; others may formulate inner dialogues. Teachers might like to create activities with multiple sub-tasks so that students can opt for a silent option, a verbal option, or a combined option. 4.7

Concluding Insights

If a teacher hates silence and sees it as a problem, silence will emerge as a problem inside the teacher. That teacher will do anything to make sure silence does not work, which might include talking meaninglessly to replace a meaningful pause or mobilising the class to substitute mindful space with hasty chatter. Imagine silence as a cup. We cannot blame the cup for having no water when we do not put any water in it. Terminating silence for not believing that it can hold thoughts would be the same as throwing a cup away for not believing that it can hold water. If we stop seeing silence as an obstacle to be overcome, we might start seeing it as a resource to be utilised. Eliminating silence from the reflective mind would be as ruthless as eliminating speech from the articulate voice. Both verbal and silent participation must be recognised as learning components on the equitable scale as both do contain learning values. Silence-inclusive pedagogy respects all of these channels of learning without bias. By not treating learners as one homogeneous type, one can bring more nuances to classroom activities. Again, the reason why silence is pedagogically included in this discussion is that many classrooms have mistakenly excluded it, not knowing that silence can be a valuable space for hosting meanings and processing resources. Without a proper understanding of both speech and silence, one might happen to conduct, in the words of Zembylas and Michaelides (2004, p. 207), ‘teaching with ignorance’ by ignoring the ‘human wholeness’ (Haskins, 2010, p. 1) in the student learning mechanism. Silence is, of course, not inherently productive but one needs to learn how to make it work. Silence, like talk, should not be used by all students in the same way but the ability to employ the internal space can be diverse and must improve. When a speaker becomes increasingly fluent, they might spend less time on internal rehearsal – not because the person has stopped rehearsing, but because many years of experience in rehearsing and using language has made them so skilful that the rehearsal happens almost as fast as not happening at all. The same phenomenon occurs when someone practises marksmanship. At first, the person aims their gun at the target, which takes a moment. Over time as practice increases, the aiming takes less and less time until one day, the marksman simply raises his gun and shoots seemingly without aiming. This,

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however, does not mean that the aiming act does not take place but simply suggests that the skill has developed to such a high art that the naked eye cannot detect it anymore. Using silence, likewise, should become a talent matured over the years so that it is used in the least time possible. In many cases, although reflection continues to take place, it precedes and merges so well with speech that the listener hardly notices it. A speaker who, after years of practising internal and external speech, still holds on to long silent pauses might not be considered an effective communicator. Although in classroom settings, teachers allow time for silence to operate as a learning tool, learners should eventually reach the point where they employ silent rehearsal skilfully enough to avoid unreasonable delays in real-world communication. While silence can be a thoughtful tool for learning, it should not become a permanent habit of communicating. Although classroom activities involve learners in silent reflection, such reflection must eventually serve the construction of thought and language.

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5

Problematising Silence

5.1

Rethinking Ways of Inquiry

Silence, like other non-verbal constructs in education, contains challenges. Identifying its nature every time undesirable silence occurs can be a daunting task. In efforts to rationalise silence quickly and clearly, some researchers narrow down their investigation by holding the learner responsible and by providing explicit reasons for silence. Such designations could be anxiety, apprehension, and incompetence. Raising the question ‘why silent?’, many projects adopt a well-ordered manner of inquiry to hopefully find the ultimate explanation and settle the case. Unfortunately, silence is an open construct whose meaning cannot be universally conclusive. The ‘why silent?’ inquiry, which demands a once-and-forall answer, may not be useful as it risks diminishing the dynamic of a highly complex and constantly changing experience. A student who is quiet in one class may not be quiet in another class. To capture this person as an inherently shy learner might be misleading because such a trait may vanish when the student is reconditioned by a new classroom setting. This means that what researchers have tried so hard to seize has now become non-existent. Silence is a chameleon whose behaviour constantly responds to its surroundings rather than acting independently. For this reason, studying the silence of someone by looking inside them is not enough: we might need to also look outside of that person. Instead of asking the snapshot question ‘why are learners silent?’ it would be more helpful to develop a more procedural inquiry: ‘how does silence occur and evolve in its context?’ 5.2

Conceptualising Negative Silence without Prejudice

Historically, silence is often problematised from a pro-speech perspective, which treats it as a weakness of the individual. Perceiving the learner as the sole initiator of their behaviour, scholars who adopt this stance reason that learners stay quiet because of their intrinsic nature. It is the silent person, rather than anyone else, who should be blamed for being uncooperative, unconfident, 74

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5.3 Silence As Cultural Immobility

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apprehensive, incompetent, unwilling to communicate, or born into the restraining Confucian culture. The portrayal of such problems includes, for example, communication apprehension (McCroskey, 1977; Aitken & Neer, 1993), withdrawal behaviour (McCroskey, 1977), receiver apprehension (Chesebro & McCroskey, 1998), conflict avoidance (Frymier & Houser, 1997), shyness (Cole & McCroskey, 2003), poor listening skills (Pearson & West, 1991), fear of mistakes (Prentice & Kramer, 2006), low language proficiency, and culture-specific communication styles (Tatar, 2005), to cite a few. Such naming, unless coupled with procedural analysis, isolates the learner as the sole target of inspection, detached from the complex involvement of others. This chapter resists holding the learner liable and proposes to problematise silence from more than one angle, that is, within the learner, outside the learner, and between the learner and the environment. Taking an unbiased perspective, the discussion presents problematic silence by situating it in the process and climate of learning to expose the multiple factors that trigger or perpetuate learners’ unhelpful silence. In other words, the problem in silence is analysed in its route of progression rather than as a static phenomenon, and in consideration of its ecological dynamics rather than as a stand-alone construct. It is through both internal and external forces that one can reach an in-depth understanding of what co-constitutes undesirable silence. As Saville-Troike (1985) maintains, ‘silence (like all nonverbal communication) is more context-embedded than speech, that is, more dependent on context for its interpretation’ (p. 11). To explore such dynamics, the chapter presents eight critical scenarios where silence fails to function productively. Drawn from scholarly research, relevant discourse, and academic experience, the cases include the following eight scenarios together with recommendations on how to respond to each of them: • silence as cultural immobility • silence as subject to misjudgement • silence as mind wandering • silence out of context • silence as resistance to poor pedagogy • silence as a lack of response • silence that is necessary but absent • silence arising from demotivational dilemmas. 5.3

Silence As Cultural Immobility

Both talk and silence can be viewed as cultural capital. Cultural capital is the social asset of a person including styles of intellectual thinking, behaving, dressing, and relating to others, all of which help promote individual integration and progress in society (Harper-Scott & Samson, 2009). How one employs silence or speech is acquired through long-term exposure and constant

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adaptation to one’s environment (such as a national culture). Unfortunately, individuals with a dual mastery of silence and talk in all contexts, who can use both communication modes efficiently across various societies, are extremely rare, if not non-existent. Problems arise when those who master the use of meaningful silence and those who are endowed with eloquent words fail to comprehend each other – with the former regarding the latter as being loquacious and the latter perceiving the former as being antisocial. Ideally, it would be helpful if individuals who move into another culture make efforts to adapt to the behavioural norms of that society. For instance, an outspoken person who sets foot in a high-context society might learn to become more attentive to how silence communicates. Likewise, a thoughtful listener who visits a vocally expressive society must learn to be more articulate to survive communication. Silence becomes a problem when a visitor to a verbal society continues holding on to their occasionally non-verbal norms and remains culturally immobile. Although this person can justify all the reasons for not talking, there is hardly any opportunity to provide such an explanation simply because no one would ask, especially when common social practice requires hearing speech rather than guessing silence. As a result, the silent person is placed in a disadvantaged position as their quietness is not only unwelcome but also misunderstood. In the classroom, highly introverted learners need the assistance of the teacher and peers to adapt and socialise rather than continue to withdraw further into themselves. Instead of spending time frowning on their unwillingness to communicate, it would be more helpful for the teacher to provide that person with a positive experience through friendly encouragement. Psychological research in cultural mobility has proven that one’s seemingly permanent traits, such as fear of communication and introversion, can change. Strong environmental influences can alter the genetically conditioned temperament of shyness (Wrightsman, 1994). Arguably, the shift towards verbal openness cannot be the task of the silent learner alone but requires stimuli from the whole teaching and learning community to socio-culturally blend that person in. Although empirical evidence shows that silence can be a permanent characteristic of one’s social identity (Morita, 2004), research in culture studies also discovers that social identity can be transformed (Burke, 2006). When someone takes on a new role and responds to new surroundings, they inter-relate with identities other than their own and this process might partially restructure that person’s seemingly persistent uniqueness. As a result of this, a talkative person can over time become a quieter person and vice versa. Such transformation is known as cultural mobility (see, for example, Sorokin, 1959; Greenblatt et al., 2009). Suppose there is a good reason for modifying identity but a silent person stubbornly refuses to adapt, continuing to be silent and persistently remaining

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contextually irrelevant; such silence reflects cultural obstinacy that might cause a problem to both that person and everyone involved. A close colleague of mine, Jonathan, who is originally from the United States and who has been a university lecturer in Japan over recent decades, is a case in point. In his home country, Jonathan used to proudly voice his opinion during public interactions to assert his confidence and a democratic stance. Being the first who spoke used to be extremely important to him for remaining himself in all contexts. Over many years, his identity has changed subconsciously and dramatically. Now Jonathan finds himself observing more and will enjoy listening to ideas shared by others without having to participate much. When I asked Jonathan what has made his behaviour change so much, he admitted that being the first to express his viewpoint in public domains does not mean anything anymore. Instead, the pleasure of being an observer who speaks only when necessary has taken over the pride of being vocal in all social circumstances. Jonathan’s life story is very much the opposite of my scenario, in which I have chosen to be more articulate when living and working over the past decades in Anglo cultures. These cases, of course, may not be representative of everyone else’s identity-shaping process. On the topic of identity construction in education, ethnographic research might need to conduct more investigation into how international students’ communication styles have been negotiated in new academic settings as well as how one has moved between speech and silence to optimise learning efficiency. 5.4

Silence As Subject to Misjudgement

Silence represents another drawback when students’ intention behind such behaviour remains unknown to the teacher and class members. Sometimes, different learners who keep quiet for different reasons might be judged in the same light. For example, someone who feels lethargic or fatigued during class discussions may switch off from involvement. In the meantime, a second student decides to keep quiet to show respect for the opinion of others rather than confront them, while a third student pauses from participating for a moment to process their thought before interacting with others. The behaviour of these students, though coming from three distinct intents, might be perceived similarly by their teacher and peers as an indication of incompetence or unenthusiasm. While the second student deserves some appreciation for caring about the emotion of others, they might lose respect for being not committed enough to carry on the discussion. If the teacher, who does not receive a timely response to a question, happens to cast a frustrated look at the student, they might feel inferior and reduce their passion for learning. They may begin to wonder how to behave next time, feeling torn between being

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considerate in their way and going out of their way to please others within the norm that they can easily interpret. It would be unfair for the student because not only do they have to struggle to process their thinking but, in the middle of that, they must also be responsible for the feelings of those who have failed to respect their feelings. The temporary quietness of the third student is also problematic as it is exercised without the understanding and support of the class, especially when peers cannot distinguish between a temporary pause to prepare for speech and the act of giving up speaking. Empirical evidence shows that the length of a pause between speaking turns is subject to misinterpretation. Interlocutors who use a long pause can be taken as not having anything to say (Scollon & Scollon, 1981; O’Keefe, 1995). To avoid misunderstanding, the teacher and other class members must keep an open mind without subjective judgment and without acting upon guesswork. In some cultures, the decision to keep silent when being asked a question is acceptable and should be comprehended as a choice rather than rudeness or incompetence (John, 1972; Philips, 1972). This happens, for example, among many students of Native American background and in the Japanese academic context. Some teachers, unfortunately, do not appreciate this cultural behaviour simply because their lifetime education has been bound to talking, making it hard for them to act otherwise. While many handbooks in education teach students how to interact verbally, they hardly show a class how to organise silence meaningfully. Because of this, teachers and students are trained to remain oblivious to the multiple meanings expressed by silence-literate people and treat them simply as noncommunicators. To be fair, it is also the responsibility of the silent learner to find ways of justifying their intention to the teacher, such as by indicating the need for more thinking time, writing an explanatory email to the teacher, asking for consultation, posting views on a discussion forum, and providing midsemester feedback. I would imagine that during classroom discussion, a student could raise their hand and request: ‘May I have five more minutes of thinking time, please?’ I do not think that any teacher who hears this would be upset by such a genuine proposal. Alternatively, a teacher who senses the increased challenge of a topic might advise: ‘Please think for a moment and share your thoughts with peers.’ If good ideas are not created but learners keep talking at any cost, the learning process might remain shallow. This reality is drawn from empirical evidence, which shows that the usefulness of inner rehearsal might be blocked by articulatory suppression (Baddeley, Chincotta & Adlam, 2001; Lupyan, Rakison & McClelland, 2007; Deans, 2012; William, Bowler & Jarrold, 2012). No silence is more damaging than teacher silence towards students’ mental processing needs.

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5.5 Silence As Mind Wandering

5.5

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Silence As Mind Wandering

Silence becomes a problem when it occurs aimlessly. This is called mind wandering, which refers to the instant when someone’s awareness is shifting from the task at hand due to unrelated thoughts (Vago & Zeidan, 2016; Barnett & Kaufman, 2020). Other common terms for this phenomenon include daydreaming, absent-mindedness, spontaneous thinking, zoning out, thought intrusions, unconscious thoughts, off-task behaviour, incidental self-processing, and undirected attention. All these variable nuances represent a disruption to classroom task performance. According to neurocognitive research, it is hard for someone to catch themselves when their mind is thinking randomly because the act of mind wandering occupies the brain regions that are employed for noticing (Schooler et al., 2011). When the noticing device becomes immobilised, the mind is roaming about in useless silence. My conversations with university students who admit daydreaming during classroom processes reveal that, apart from what seems to be their inherent personality or habit, the brain easily gets intruded on by unwanted thoughts when the content of the lesson seems dull or tiring, and when the lecturer seems unappealing in either behaviour or pedagogical ability. Arguably, individuals who slide into this mental state suffer from learning poorly, not because they are trapped in silence but because they are trapped in the inability to employ silence properly. Learning goes wrong when silence is not being used rather than when it is used. The same logic would apply to speech. Some talkative students suffer from poor learning due to their inability to optimise speech. In other words, learning goes wrong when talk is being misused rather than when it is used. For example, when a learner is not making sense, their words blurt out in an endless stream of chatter without much learnable value. When this happens, words become useless. This analogy highlights the reality that silence can be as complex as speech – except that we cannot hear silence and thus it becomes even more difficult to handle than speech. To retain student attention, both in silent thinking and in verbal participation, teachers must train themselves to be inspiring communicators and make efforts to keep the lesson content constantly appealing. After all, it is how learners utilise both speech and silence (not whether they talk or keep silent) that matters. Research on effective conversation shows that reasonable turntaking provides a free flow of communication (Okata, 2016). Likewise, there is a strong possibility that if learners take turns to be silent, a free flow of mutual understanding might be established, especially when the teacher makes sure that every silent turn has a purpose. Without an objective, both speech and silence would impede learning.

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5.6

Silence Out of Context

Silence is a problem when it contradicts the common expectation of the majority in a shared context. In societies with a high tolerance for and understanding of silence, people are brought up to read silence as language. Timely and appropriate silence builds social etiquettes without which communication would break down. In pro-speech societies, however, not hearing speech makes people nervous. The audible word is an engine that needs to run frequently and silence signifies the breakdown of that engine (Lemak, 2012). As an educator, it is important to be attentive to both of these perspectives. During fieldwork for an ongoing project (Bao & Shachter, forthcoming, 2023), it was learned that in many classrooms in Japan, open discussion does not happen easily because students are equipped with highly cautious conduct towards communal unity. A student who cares about the learning of others would not dominate talking time. Those who anticipate peer evaluation would ensure that their idea is truly valuable before sharing it. Someone who avoids hurting the feeling of peers might not wish to disagree or interrupt. A student with a trivial idea might refrain from voicing it for fear that its irrelevance might disturb topic consistency. Those who are talkative without listening enough might be seen by others as having an intrusive manner. All these selfrestraint strategies and internalised respect for others remain so robust that they end up causing silence to prevail, simply because to risk behaving wrongly might jeopardise good relationships with the group. Everyone is behaving as if walking on eggshells, while in many Western classrooms, throwing eggs around is the game. Such silence in the Japanese class is not a problem but a reality that makes sense to everyone. The fact that no one is shocked, surprised, upset, or disappointed shows that silence is normal. There are, however, times when an occasional individual resents this. Research by King (2013a, 2013b) shows that in advanced English classes, some students do not support a quiet climate and feel awkward when someone resists answering the teacher’s question. In the context of a conversation class where the teacher makes eye contact with a student and asks a simple question, but the student neither exchanges a look nor utters a word, silence then turns into a problem. It is because, in this scenario, the nature of learning has modified the expectation. When Japanese students move to an Australian classroom, their silence becomes subject to judgement. Once the semester has settled in and if students remain uncommunicative with peers, the lecturer will be upset and Australian classmates will be disappointed. Again, silence, due to the change of context, turns into a problem as it entails a clash in learning collaboration. Sometimes, with the increase in exposure, observation, and experience, some Japanese students gradually adapt to the Australian style and begin to treat Australian

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5.7 Silence As Resistance to Poor Pedagogy

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classmates differently from how they treat their Japanese peers at home. Although some reinvent their behaviour to get involved in more spontaneous communication, others find such adaptation rather difficult. Silence is rarely an objective problem for everyone. Whether it is captured as a problem or not is a matter of who views it and the sociocultural expectation of the dominant members in that context. Scollon and Scollon’s (1981) ethnographic study of cross-cultural communication in the United States demonstrates this reality. While many Anglo-Americans are negatively stereotyped by Athabaskans as being talkative and aggressive, many Athabaskans are negatively stereotyped by Anglo-Americans as being reserved and uncooperative. Sometimes, a delay in response can be misinterpreted as silence. For example, research by Nakane (2005) suggests that the waiting time between speaking turns may be interpreted differently between the Japanese and Australian cultures. If, in a Japanese classroom, the teacher and peers can wait for a student to think and speak, in an Australian classroom, that opportunity would pass by quickly. When a student being asked a question hesitates for more than two seconds, someone else will steal that turn and speak, turning the former into a silent person. In this way, what initially is not considered silence in one context can be viewed as silence in another. Such mutual perception is confirmed in another study by Harumi (2011) when Japanese students’ waiting time gets misinterpreted by native English-speaking peers as a sign of disinterest. To resolve such cultural conflict might require some degree of negotiation whereby one cultural group makes efforts to behave more like the others. Either of the groups can reach some behavioural compromise or the teacher might like to reset participation rules. In many cases, it is the responsibility of visitors to adapt to the style of the host, who in turn might wish to be hospitable and tolerant towards differences. After all, silence needs to be judged within its everyday social dynamic rather than be removed from its context and treated as an independent issue. 5.7

Silence As Resistance to Poor Pedagogy

The discourse on reticence often identifies this phenomenon as stemming from low proficiency (Hu & Fell-Eisenkraft, 2003; Tatar, 2005; AlHalawachy, 2014; Qian, 2020) and fear of negative evaluation (Coleman, 1997; Ladd & Ruby, 1999; Cheng, 2000; Y. Lee, 2007). Research by Alhazmi (2006) and Diaab (2016), however, looks beyond these findings and reveals that much of learners’ seemingly passive silence originates from ineffective pedagogy more than it derives from the individual weakness of the learner. Besides, poor task design is also responsible for perpetuating learner reticence. Many coursebooks are filled with speaking

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activities that expect learners to participate immediately without teaching them the relevant language needed for such participation. In the meantime, some teachers who direct these activities in the classroom tend to follow instructions in textbooks and do not modify them to help learners rehearse language form. As a result, many learners do not have the opportunity to develop their proficiency to the expected level but, over the years, are left linguistically unskilled. Some teachers view students as being verbally incompetent without realising that poor-quality teaching is partly responsible for that. The following strategies might help students cope with such situations and build more positive learning experiences. • Instead of having students participate in full sentences, the teacher can create activities that only require the contribution of short utterances in words and phrases. • Instead of having students utter their ideas verbally, the teacher encourages them to write down their thoughts and share them with peers. • Instead of asking for a spontaneous discussion, the teacher asks students to form groups, co-create a poster of ideas, and collectively present that poster to the class. • Instead of always discussing content or meaning, the teacher allocates some time for students to discuss linguistic forms, practise them, and ask questions to ease student struggle in language usage. • Instead of having learners always use the target language, the teacher allocates some time when learners are allowed to employ their first language for generating ideas. 5.8

Silence As a Lack of Response

Silence is not an appropriate way of coping with fluency tasks that require spontaneous responses. Some examples of such tasks are pronunciation practice, mechanical drills, memory rehearsal, small talk, and simple exchanges of information. By nature, these activities are stress-free as they contain low cognitive challenges. Being designed for developing automaticity, these types of exercises are not subject to thought processing. If a student refuses to repeat a word but keeps silent, that would not be considered normal behaviour unless the person happens to be eating a lot of red chillies and their mouth currently hurts. Suppose the task is about getting to know each other. When one person says, ‘it’s nice meeting you’, there is no sensible reason for the other person to wait too long to give a response. If someone does not make any utterance in that case but simply stares back and reflects deeply on what they hear, the person would appear to others as being physically, socially, or mentally unhealthy. Empirical

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research reveals that without a clear purpose, silence becomes more disruptive than positive (Evans, 1996). There are, however, moments when learners wish to move out of silence and speak but the teacher fails to welcome such efforts. Sprott (2000) reports a sad experience of a student who stays silent because the teacher does not believe in her ability to contribute to the learning process. Research by Bao (2002) reveals that some teachers who assume that students are either passive or incompetent do not show a warm attitude towards these students. Even when the students make great efforts to participate, the teacher takes that for granted and does not use that contribution for further interaction. Although such an experience might seem normal to highly verbal students, it would be a blow to quiet students and might intimidate them from trying to participate in the future. Evans (1996) recognises how a teacher’s poor appreciation of willingness to change can lead students to socially withdraw, a situation that Nemiroff, Schindler and Schreiber (2000) identify as a conflict between personal values inherent in a person’s identity and the otherness that is imperialistically imposed upon them. Corson (2001) explains that such a situation tends to occur among people of non-dominant backgrounds, especially when they try to blend in with the dominant social group but receive little support. In this dilemma, silence is not the problem of the quiet individual but represents their justifiable reaction to undesirable emotions imposed on them (Lehtonen, Sajavaara & Manninen, 1985; Foss & Reitzel, 1988; Phillips, 1991). 5.9

Silence That Is Necessary but Absent

This would be the reverse of the above scenario. In the former case, silence happens when it is not required while, in the latter, silence is required but one continues to speak. Once I attended a seminar on the benefit of deep engagement with nature by a well-established professor in the philosophy of education. Towards the end of her presentation, someone in the audience, who was an expert in a related field, asked a challenging question: ‘Is there any qualitative difference between engagement with an object in nature and engagement with a human?’ The professor genuinely commented that she had not thought of such a comparison before but would like to try her best to address the issue. Before answering, she warned: ‘I might need a moment to process my idea, as I’m afraid that after making a statement, I might disagree with myself.’ Having said that, the professor did not pause to think but went ahead and shared (not her complete thought but) her thinking-aloud awareness. She answered but apologised for not giving what was expected of her advanced expertise. She then promised to work on the topic further so that she could get back to the asker sometime after the seminar. Everyone respected the way the professor handled the question when she not only performed her best but also

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remained responsible and modest by making a promise to pursue the question later. By not answering immediately but saying something else to buy some thinking time, the professor employed exploratory speech and hopefully came up with a meaningful answer. She did not keep silent to think because that would break the communication norms at the conference. After the talk, I could not help pondering on this incident by asking myself: ‘What if the professor had requested that the audience wait two minutes in total silence for her to sit down and plan her response? Would she have provided a more rewarding answer? Would the audience have rejected her request and demanded that she must speak immediately (otherwise they would lose respect for her)?’ The reason for this curiosity comes from my observation at many public talks where some speakers, instead of asking for the audience’s permission to think first, invariably go ahead and rush through an unprepared answer of incomplete quality. As I recall, between using preparative silence and talking casually to buy time, many speakers would opt for casual, poor-quality speech (as if speaking deficiently would save face better than keeping quiet and then speaking well). If using a little processing time demonstrates that someone is less of an expert, then I realise that I am not a true expert since I am not a fast speaker but often slow down and sometimes do ask for permission to think. Not only would I delay my speech, but I would also encourage my students to do the same. In our class, we set a rule that every time a student or a teacher is being confronted by a question that they struggle to answer, they have the right to say: ‘Let me get back to you after five minutes.’ I do not think that this choice would be damaging to teaching and learning. The decision to spend time on advanced preparation has been identified through research by Wade (1994) and Lemak (2012) as an important factor that supports classroom discussion and fosters students’ critical reflection skills. Silence becomes problematic when one needs it but is afraid of using it because of external inhibitions and the pressure to conform to public norms. In our classrooms, if norms do not make sense, my students and I gladly propose to change them. When students are allowed to break existing rules or create new rules for a good reason, they become the agent of their learning. In many cases, in rushing to speak out at any cost we might risk becoming slaves to presumptions. O’Keeffe (1992) highlights the importance of rule-sharing regarding the use of silence in the classroom and suggests that the teacher can always recommend a few rules to be evaluated and modified by members of the class community. Research on Japanese students’ participation anxiety by Maher (2020) provides evidence that when students are helped to see the benefit of a strategy and experience positive acceptance to behave differently, they gain the courage to control fear and adopt a more participatory behaviour. Similarly, a study by Karas and Faez (2020) of Chinese students at a Canadian university also demonstrates that ‘feeling unsafe to speak in

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class’ often holds students back from participation (p. 112). When methods of reducing anxiety and confusion are provided, students can ‘recharge the mind’ to internalise learning content, build thoughts, and express their views more freely (p. 113). 5.10

Silence Arising from Demotivational Dilemmas

Silence might stem from unmotivated and under-motivated learning. There can be, in every classroom, students who come to the education setting with little or hardly any readiness for learning, including those who are forced by parents to study against their will. I have had opportunities to talk with students without aspirations to higher education who come from well-to-do families that would pay high costs to send their children overseas. What these students hope to achieve are only sufficient grades to pass and receive a degree as a way of fulfilling the family’s wish. Due to their low motivation in learning, they do not intend to perform remarkably nor do they make any effort to contribute to classroom work. These students neither speak nor process information but prefer to keep their minds mostly relaxed. Every day, they cannot wait for class to be over so that they can go out shopping or partying and enjoy themselves with friends. In one extreme case, one student told me he was given 30,000 Australian dollars (equivalent to 22,400 US dollars or 16,163 British pounds sterling) a month to spend and would need to go out as much as possible to spend it. Silence of this type can be damaging to the mood of the class due to its resistance to the teacher’s communication effort and any pedagogical stimulus (Beach, 2010). The most challenging part of such silence is that teachers cannot tell whether the students are under-motivated, that is, wanting to learn but needing help to increase enthusiasm, or simply unmotivated, that is, not wanting to learn, not needing an education, and resisting any advice to help them study better (Seidman, 2005). McFarlane (2010) recommends a personal approach by providing choices during class work and assessment, such as writing an individual essay, giving a team presentation, or visiting a place and sharing some reflections. Different students will choose the option they can handle or make do with. Another approach occasionally recommended in higher education settings is to employ peer mentorship to explore needs and expectations as well as to build mutual support (see, for example, Lorenzetti et al., 2019). Obtaining such help from peers, either from the same class or from different classes, would reduce the burden on the teacher to identify why learning passion seems missing. As far as silence is concerned, employing peer collaboration in exploring each other’s learning inclinations is an area that has not attracted much empirical research to date.

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5.11

Concluding Insights

This chapter has refrained from taking snapshots of silence by naming its causes but has contextualised its processes where possible. The recommendations for improving silence in this chapter are not supposed to be stable and might need modification depending on evolving circumstances. Each of the scenarios discussed in the chapter may not be representative or conclusive but is open-ended in the sense that if one element in that context changes, the nature of silence also alters accordingly. For example, suppose the teacher in Section 5.4 did not cast a frustrated look at the second student but encouraged them to share their view and employed their contribution for further discussions, the student might become inspired enough to negotiate their learning behaviour and adapt more confidently to the verbal style of the majority. The student’s silence would be less problematic than what was narrated in the scenario. Viewed in this dynamic, problematic silence is not an inscription carved in stone but is part of a chemical reaction in the unpredictable society of classroom learning. Ideally, this ecological view of silence needs to be incorporated into teacher professional development programmes to raise awareness that classroom problems above all should be a shared responsibility among all individuals rather than being designated to individual students in isolation. Working with a classroom filled with twenty to thirty unique learners is a challenge. While some might use silence as a learning mode, others may stay in silence as a form of learning denial. Some may temporarily suffer from unwanted silence and are waiting for support whereas others adopt silence to resist pedagogy that is unsuited to them. Methods of finding out the dynamic of silence in every individual can be a highly demanding task, which the subsequent chapter will discuss.

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6

Ways of Addressing Classroom Silence

During conferences, I am frequently confronted by these burning questions from the audience: What would you do if many students in your class were silent? What is your solution to the lack of participation? These queries are founded upon the widespread belief among many teachers and scholars that learner silence is an inhibition to learning efficiency (Sivan et al., 2000; Bista & Blimes, 2011; Plakans, 2011, to cite a few). Since this is an area of great interest to many teachers, I would like to devote this chapter to addressing it. To recognise this need to battle silence, my discussion will involve mostly unwanted silence that would impede learning and not productive silence that would enhance learning, which has been discussed extensively in other chapters. Although I had already anticipated the above concerns, I was unable to provide a straightforward solution to learner silence, simply because such a solution does not exist. That would be the same as asking a doctor what medicine can treat all illnesses. When a teacher steps into a new classroom where many students do not speak, there is a strong possibility that the reasons behind students’ withdrawal are not identical. Students struggle differently. Very much in the same way as, when treating an illness, a doctor first must know what the illness is, where it comes from, and how it evolves. To understand how a silent student struggles to learn is to take one step towards helping them. In my PhD research project (Bao, 2002) on 300 English language learners in Vietnam, I discovered that learner silence is the consequence of their struggle in three distinct ways. They struggle with themselves, with the present, and with the past. These words from students during in-depth interviews show how they struggle with the silence in themselves, which has to do with their personality, habit, and viewpoint or, in other words, with the socio-psychological nature and beliefs learners bring into the classroom. I’m worried about the quality of my speech, and so I’d rather not show my clumsiness. I’m simply not in the habit of participating in the lesson. Besides, my English is not only broken but also incomprehensible. What then is 87

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the use of speaking when people don’t know what you’re talking about? Speaking a foreign language is a stressful activity. Whenever I open my mouth to speak, I forget completely all the English I’ve learned before. The following thoughts capture how students struggle with the silence in the past, that is, due to their unhappy learning experiences that have been prolonged and that have not been fixed. This history of behaviour comprises both classroom experiences and educational traditions beyond the classroom. I think the policy of our Ministry of Education is that learning to speak English is not a concern. Working on textbook exercises seems more important. We simply do not have experience with English in the classroom. Some teachers speak Vietnamese most of the time during the lesson, and when they switch to English, it was often very difficult to understand them. The words below indicate how they struggle with the silence in the present, which comes from the ongoing development of learner perception and attitudes towards the teacher, the language, and the environment. I am simply bored. The atmosphere is not interesting enough. Perhaps I could talk a little bit, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m just not in the talking mood. I sometimes feel lazy . . . I’m tired from working all day in the office, and so in the evening, I prefer to make myself comfortable by sitting back and listening rather than speaking. My class was large. There were so many other students, so I did not expect to have a turn to speak. I’m sitting in a very silent class. If the rest of my class participates more, I’ll be more willing to speak. Young classmates learn better than us . . . It would be embarrassing, as their senior, to have them laugh at the way we talk English, therefore we would rather remain silent. Not that I don’t have words and grammar to use but, so far, my teachers haven’t helped me use these. In the end, I know English but cannot use it. Our teachers did not create opportunities for us to speak English but lectured most of the time. Our teacher frightens us. He criticises every mistake we make and so he embarrasses students in front of the class. Out of all reflections on silence in this study, almost 80 per cent of data points to learner struggle with ongoing circumstances, while the rest of the

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struggle comes from the students themselves and from the history of being in an educational system without sufficient support towards speech. This proportion of what shapes the silent struggle happens to reflect precisely what happens in the research discourse on silence. When I analysed nearly eighty studies about learner silence to write this chapter, 70 per cent of them point to silence shaped by ongoing interaction with teachers, peers, materials, and the environment and the rest to where silence stems from learner identity and past experiences. Below is a summary of what the research discourse says. The summary captures these aspects of learner silence: silence as a struggle with oneself, silence as a struggle with the past, and silence as a struggle with the present (Figure 6.1). 6.1

Silence As a Struggle with Oneself

6.1.1

Self-Perceiving Limited Fluency

When learners internalise their L2 verbal fluency as being lower than that of peers, they are worried about sounding inferior if they talk (Liu & Littlewood, 1997; Jackson, 2002; Hu & Fell-Eisenkraft, 2003; Tatar, 2005; Ping, 2010; Zheng, 2010; Harumi, 2011; King, 2013a, 2013b; AlHalawachy, 2014 ). This is not precisely students’ fault but, in many cases, teachers might be partly responsible for failing to scaffold learners’ L2 development over the years (Bannai, 1980; Bingham, 1997; Offner, 1997; O’Sullivan, 1997). Such a dilemma is also enhanced by the pressure to compete for participation turns among highly eloquent peers (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Morita, 2000, 2004; Tsui, 2007).

The past

Oneself

The present

The silent struggle

Figure 6.1 The dimensions of learner struggle with silence

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6.1.2

Being an Introvert by Nature

Research in the psychology of learning has produced extensive evidence of how personality types affect students’ ways of learning. While extroverts enjoy open discussion and interaction with the teacher, introverts find it more comfortable to listen, reflect, take notes, and respond only when they feel it is particularly necessary (Chamorro-Premuzic, Furnham & Lewis, 2007; Lawrence, 2015; Murphy et al., 2017). If this inconspicuous learning style remains persistent and is not adjusted, it makes communicative tasks difficult and constrains the ideology of idea-sharing among classmates. 6.1.3

Hoping to Remain Humble

To some learners, speaking minimally denotes refined manners while talking generously might mean showing off knowledge or excessive confidence (Liu & Littlewood, 1997; Fang-Yu, 2011). In some cultures, such as Japanese and Turkish, silence signifies modesty both in everyday social situations and in educational settings whereas a high volume of verbalism often reveals superficiality (Khatun, 2019). Being cautious with articulation means that one internalises the need to avoid being irrelevant, intrusive, confrontational, wordy, and impolite. Empirical research by Bao (2014) and Nakane (2007) on Japanese students as well as by Zhou, Knoke, and Sakamoto (2005) on Chinese students attributes the motive for silence to respect and self-modesty. Besides, some students might enjoy the lesson but prefer to keep a low profile to avoid peer tension and potential conflict (Schulz, 2001). 6.2

Silence As a Struggle with the Past

6.2.1

Being Held Back by Low Self-Esteem

Many learners suffer from poor self-perception because of unpleasant past learning experiences. Research by Morrison and Thomas (1975) discovers that students’ dissatisfactory perception of the self has a strong impact on them and causes social withdrawal, manifested by choosing to sit in the back row, refraining from participation, and working less hard than they should. Such situations may be worse when these students lack verbal practice over time and become even less enthusiastic about contributing (Hamouda, 2013). 6.2.2

Feeling Invisible

Many students withdraw into themselves as they have recently moved to their class from another context. Being new, they feel out of place and disoriented from not having developed fluency, friendship, and compatible ways of

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learning. If the classroom offers no social-inclusion policy or strategies, students do not feel comfortable and do not wish to participate. This is a finding from research studies by Mack (2012) and Nyikos and Hashimoto (1997). Learners from a different culture or setting often need time and support to develop academic skills and a sense of belonging that will assist spontaneous verbal talk (Coombs et al., 2014; Ha & Li, 2014). Some also struggle with comprehension, experiencing a hard time grasping challenging lesson content. When students fail to access learning content and make progress, they can easily feel insignificant and lose learning enthusiasm (Riggenback & Lazaraton, 1991; Richards & Renandya, 2002; Richards, 2008; Amri, 2020). 6.2.3

Coming from Cultures Where a Pause in Turn-Taking is Normal

Turn-taking behaviours vary from one society to another. In some East Asian cultures, for example, it is polite to wait for someone to finish their thought before taking a few seconds to think and then responding (Szkudlarek, 2017). Since the participation rules expected in many Western classrooms do not have room for such a practice, East Asian students often find themselves suffering from the unknown discontinuity between their culture and the classroom culture. The difference in cultures of learning is an important source of explanation for why switching learning behaviours often proves to be a challenge (Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Zhou et al., 2005; Armstrong, 2007a; Harumi, 2011; Choi, 2015; Ghavamnia & Ketabi, 2015; Yashima, Ikeda & Nakahira, 2016; Shao & Gao, 2016). In Freudian theory, data of social experience are stored in the mind, and it is to such memory that one continues to react (Phillips, 1991; Halbwachs, 1992). 6.2.4

The Role of Family Upbringing

A study by Bao (2002) reveals that learner silence is not just a question of classroom and social pressure but in many cases has its roots in child-rearing within the family. In many Asian cultures, children who commit serious mistakes that cause their parents to be angry are often asked to leave the house and can only return home when they feel that the lesson has been properly learned. For them, having to go out alone and survive the real world is a terrifying experience. By contrast, children who are raised in many Western cultures tend to get punished for bad behaviour by being grounded inside the house. For them, being shut off from socialising with the outside world is a rather frightening lesson. While Western children are taught to develop socialising skills, many of their Asian counterparts are made to be aware of the shamefulness of uncontrollable speech and the importance of keeping

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individual thoughts in the mind. Because of this, for some Asian students, sharing personal thoughts in the public space of the classroom is likely to undermine significant values in their system. 6.3

Silence As a Struggle with the Present

6.3.1

Failing to Catch Up with the Quick-Thinking Pace of Classroom Discussion

Quick versus slow verbal participation might evoke the feeling of power or the lack of it. Research shows that the dominant verbal climate of the classroom often intimidates less eloquent learners from joining in (Jaworski & Sachdev, 1998; Tatar, 2005; Zhou et al., 2005; Yates & Nguyen, 2012; Ibrahim et al., 2017; O’Connor et al., 2017). Although some researchers emphasise anxiety as a massive cause of reticence and believe that removing anxiety would enable learners to speak (Xia, 2009), others have found that the absence of anxiety might not be a sufficient solution to the problem. Even when fear disappears, avoidance might continue as subjects have had intensive experience with avoidance behaviour (Mazur, 1990). In many cases, not participating often comes from a combination of worry, avoidance, disposition, routine, and peer influence. To single out anxiety as the sole cause of silence, therefore, might oversimplify the entire picture. Besides, as drawn from psychological research, the question of whether anxiety is associated with incompetence remains controversial (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1989). To some extent, anxiety might even have a positive value. Although extreme anxiety in the classroom is a impediment, there is no research evidence to confirm that all degrees of anxiety should be eliminated (Bernard, 1972). 6.3.2

Being Demotivated by Unhelpful Teachers

Learning, besides its cognitive dimension, is filled with social and psychological functions (Hallinan, 2008). One of the most special attributes of a teacher is sensitivity towards the evolvement of students’ feelings and needs, rather than their needs alone. Research by Crawford and MacLeod (1990), Tokoz-Goktepe (2014), and Turner and Patrick (2004) reveals that low support from the teacher is an inhibiting factor to learners’ participation attempts. Such low support comes from, for example, not giving a positive evaluation of student contribution, not using learner contribution for further interaction, taking quiet students’ effort to speak up for granted, and failing to acknowledge such rare progress. A teacher who can show interest in students as individuals will make a difference in their learning. Research by Good, Biddle,

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and Brophy (1976) endorses the impact of teachers’ affective behaviour on students’ learning progress and concludes that such ‘evidence was impressive’ (p. 371). 6.3.3

Feeling Bored by Uninteresting Content

Empirical evidence by Littlewood (2004) confirms that learners’ level of interest in lesson content plays a major role in how much learners feel inspired to participate. A study by Mack (2012) on eighty-five Japanese students also reveals that students easily lose verbal inspiration through poorly presented content. In many cases, it is not the lesson topic that is inherently amusing or boring, but it is the teacher’s individual talent that would make subject matters more appealing to student learning. On the one hand, a monotonous classroom atmosphere already fails to inspire learner contribution (Wu, 1991). On the other hand, it is the teacher’s lack of charisma and motivational support that severely reduces learners’ desire to be involved in classroom conversations (Mitchell, 1985). 6.3.4

Being Unprepared to Contribute

Learners who come to class unprepared for discussion might not want the teacher and peers to know about their negligence. In many cases, the debate content requires students to do preparatory reading, which some of them do not have a chance to do for various personal reasons. Research by Fassinger (1995) demonstrates that unpreparedness for new lesson content is one of the reasons why some individual students remain quieter than their peers. Good physical and mental health represents another kind of readiness. There are cases in which learners do not participate as they are lethargic, tired, sick, hungry, or worried about their personal problems. A study conducted by Littlewood (2004) on 567 university students in Hong Kong discovers that tiredness is a major inhibitor of participatory enthusiasm. 6.3.5

Needing More Time to Digest Information

Cognitive challenges represent another source of delay in verbal contribution (Jones, 1999; Charlesworth, 2008; Harumi, 2011). Research by Skinnari (2014) reveals that some students keep silent most of the time as they internalise themselves as ‘slow thinkers’ (p. 51) and do not want to disturb the pace of class discussion. Sometimes, a student has already thought enough and has formed an idea to contribute yet at that moment the discussion is progressing beyond the point that the student was hoping to share views about. This phenomenon is identified as ‘speaker delays’ (Swanson & Hornsby, 2002,

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p. 100). When this happens, the student’s frustration mounts due to the difficulty in catching up with everyone else and, after some time, the student might decide to give up participating altogether. The teacher is often unaware when slow thinkers keep being excluded from classroom processes. 6.3.6

Being Uncertain about How to Participate

Learners’ early withdrawal might come from uncertainty about the rules and structure of classroom participation (Burns & Joyce, 1997; Jaworski & Sachdev, 1998; Chu & Kim, 1999; Inoue, 1999; Liu, 2001, 2005; Jackson, 2002; Chen, 2003; Kim, 2006). A study by Au and Mason (1983) discovers that if the rule of class participation is not made congruent with students’ background experiences, it will become difficult to contribute to the lesson simply because students are unable to interpret cultural expectations. Besides, some learners are used to listening rather than speaking; they prefer to take notes of their thoughts and are not in the habit of sharing ideas with others (Charlesworth, 2008; Jones, 1999; Liu, 2001). In some cases, learners ‘have not experienced English and therefore not developed their ability to use it’ (Tomlinson, 1991, pp. 90–1). 6.3.7

Feeling Alienated from the Teacher and Peers

Alienation is defined as a feeling of disconnectedness from others (Gablinske, 2014) and such interpersonal distance can be detrimental to the desire for classroom participation. Ample research evidence shows that a strong teacher–student relationship plays an essential and positive role in students’ learning inspiration and commitment (Sarason, 1999; Crosnoe, Johnson & Elder, 2004; Hamre et al., 2012). Many learners refrain from participating because their connection with the teacher has not been established (Cheng, 2000; Shan, 2020). Research in educational psychology since the 1950s shows that, if students do not enjoy working with the teacher, they tend to avoid contact (Bernard, 1954; Leontiev, 1981; Gardner, 1985; Brown, 1987). Besides, reticence also results from a cold relationship with peers. Not all classroom communication is pedagogic in nature, but ‘in common with other social settings, there is the need to establish and maintain personal relationships’ (Malamah-Thomas, 1996, p. 14). 6.3.8

A Mismatch between Learners’ Perception and Behaviour

The study by Bao (2002) discussed at the start of this chapter discovers a striking difference between students’ self-perceived roles in ideology and their selfobserved roles in actual practice. Many students do not act in ways that they

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believe are right. Instead, most students constantly refrain from what they think they should do. The majority (74.3 per cent) of the 138 silent students seem acutely aware that they are expected to speak out in the classroom. Seventy-two per cent feel that not participating in class events is neither a normal nor a desirable situation and 64 per cent assume that their role in the classroom is to verbally interact. Fifty-three per cent assume that their learning should involve asking questions of the teacher and peers. In a word, there is a strong tendency among students to wish they could participate more during classroom discussions. Despite such aspirations, most of these students find themselves constantly withdrawing into silence against their own will. Almost half (46 per cent) of the respondents admit that they constantly stay outside of verbal interaction and tend to withdraw into themselves. Eighty-nine per cent are aware that they never raise any questions whatsoever, whether to the teacher or peers. Occasionally some students participate, but that happens only when the teacher asks a question and calls upon them to answer. Few students take the initiative to speak out except in choral answers which make them feel safer than speaking alone. Moments when one single student voluntarily speaks to the teacher would be the exception rather than the rule. To summarise, it seems that what learners think does not lead to how they act. 6.3.9

Mismatch in Teacher–Learner Expectations

Psychologically, learning involves the modification of perception and behaviour. When our surrounding conditions change, we begin to modify our perception and this changed perception will then modify our behaviour to satisfy our new needs (Bernard, 1972). As a study by Bao (2002) demonstrates what is formed in the teacher’s mind about students’ behaviour (e.g. the assumption that students do not wish to participate) will lead to their choice of a teaching method (e.g. losing patience and deciding to lecture during most of the lesson). Such a decision, in turn, will affect the way students perceive classroom events (e.g. thinking that the teacher only wishes to lecture instead of encouraging interaction), which eventually results in behaviour (e.g. giving up trying to speak and choosing to keep quiet). Once again, this quietness continues the vicious circle of making the teacher believe that students have no intention to participate. The cycle is shown in Figure 6.2. In other words, the above logic is mapped out from numerous responses by both teachers and students in the research. Some revealing explanations are given in Figure 6.3. Interview and survey data regarding mutual expectations invariably reveal a notable causal relationship between teacher decision and learner reaction, which means that what the teacher believes will eventually make an impact on

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Teacher perception

Teacher decision

Student decision Student perception

Figure 6.2 A cycle of teacher and learner mutual influence

Teacher: ‘My students are too passive and don’t want to speak. How can I help them?’ (Teacher sees students as passive)

Teacher: ‘If they participated more, I would interact more with them instead of lecturing so much as I’m doing now…’ (Teacher has no choice but to lecture)

Students: ‘I wish he taught speaking so I could practise conversing more during the lesson…’ (Students have no choice but to withdraw into themselves)

Students: ‘My teacher is passive and routine. He doesn’t teach me conversational English, but only likes to lecture…’ (Students see the teacher as unhelpful)

Figure 6.3 Examples of teacher and learner mutual thoughts

how students perform. This observation lends weight to the argument that teacher perceptions do play a crucial role in the phenomenon of reticence. 6.4

A Rewarding System That Works with Pragmatic Learners

Some teachers have asked me: Is there a method to identify the causes of silence in every class? This enquiry seems to tap into the supernatural as if asking: How do you look into students’ eyes and tell what thoughts are in their heads? Unfortunately, there is no mind-blowing technique to get into their brains and detect all the intentions of silence; such skills only exist in science fiction. Some researchers argue that we do not need to know why learners do not speak because, if we reward students for agreeing to speak, we will resolve all problems; no matter why they are silent, they will all move away from it together.

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One commonly employed solution is the credit-point system that awards grades to students for making a verbal contribution to the lesson (see, for example, Reinsch & Wambsganss, 1994; Boniecki & Moore, 2003). This approach works with some learners but, unfortunately, not with others, simply because it neglects any genuine understanding of individual silences while subjectively hoping that learning passion can be measured in numerical values. Being treated like robots rather than as human beings with emotions, many silent students continue to resist participation, feeling that the classroom process is far from respectful. In many cases, it is the overemphasis on grades to the detriment of other aspects of education that weakens students’ love for learning (Ravitch, 2010). 6.5

A Humanistic System That Works with Reflective Learners

In the meantime, other researchers have come up with a different design that includes more humanistic elements in the process of student learning. Such elements include, for example, social networks, a cohesive classroom climate, teacher nomination, learner preparation, and wait time (Dallimore et al., 2006; Yashima et al., 2018; King et al., 2020). This approach, which recognises learners’ affective and social needs in ways that were absent from the former design, has achieved reasonable responses from silent students and can help them become more open. However, the degree of success of various projects often varies depending on context and the nature of learner silence. A major challenge lies in the fact that the elements being introduced into the classroom process are few while the reasons behind learner silence tend to be voluminous. Learning from conceivable gaps left by previous research, this chapter offers two recommendations. One is to consider the timing of anti-silence strategies and the other is to employ an extended range of strategies at the same time in every lesson. 6.6

A Preparative System to Minimise the Occurrence of Negative Silence

The third solution is addressing silence before rather than during the lesson. Instead of trying to respond to negative silence when it occurs (which would be too late), it might be more helpful to focus on minimising unfavourable conditions so that negative silence is less likely to occur. In other words, one may not wish to wait for undesirable silence to happen first and then think of how to treat it, simply because that would require multiple steps which would slow down pedagogical efficiency. First, the teacher must identify silent students who need help. Secondly, one needs to find out why each behaves thus and have a solution ready for each case.

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Thirdly, teachers need to apply every strategy, observe student response, and evaluate it. Finally, they need to reflect on the experience to improve the antisilence strategy for the next use. Such an extended procedure would be too time-consuming and cognitively stressful. If many students in the class exhibit vastly different ways of being silent, the teacher might need to spend most of the class time combatting silence and would end up feeling mentally drained. This would be comparable to the task of one nurse having to run around to indulge a group of infants who are crying for all kinds of reasons at the same time. To be one step ahead, what every teacher should do is organise classroom processes in ways that reduce the chances of negative silence emerging from the beginning. For that to happen, it might be wise to replace silence-coping strategies with silence-preventive strategies. This plan would be like the act of cautiously fighting a war in which one would not wait for the enemy to attack first and then begin to discuss ways of resisting. A strong army must make sure that the defence line is so sturdy that the enemy will hardly find conditions to assault right from the first attempt. 6.7

Eight Dimensions of Support for Undesirable Silence

To battle silence requires not viewing the phenomenon as a static construct. The literature on educational psychology maintains that learning behaviour should be viewed as reflecting students’ actions rather than abilities (Hyman & Rosoff, 1987). Even when a teacher can identify a student’s learning style today, in the next lesson that style may take on a modified nature. Compared with learning, teaching represents a dimension of facility that is easier for teachers to keep in check. As Hyman and Rosoff (1987) suggest, the maximum level of control the teacher can have in the classroom is control over their actions – no matter what the students’ learning style and no matter what the subject matter. Gibson and Chandler (1988) also argue that the teacher is the most instrumental factor in making the learning experience a success for students. To change learner behaviour, teachers must first change how they have tended to respond to such behaviour (Fontana, 1994). In a word, by attending to teaching strategies, teachers can focus on what they can control the most. The recommended strategies below, however, do not come from scholars or teachers. They are proposed by 294 students in a study by Bao (2002) in response to the question ‘What should the teacher do to encourage better participation from you?’ In other words, what this section suggests the teacher should do represents their students’ advice. Below are some supportive methods drawn from my observation and experience in making silence in the classroom less of a negative challenge. These strategies might take time as some of them requires teacher skilfulness while

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others might not produce immediate results, considering we are dealing with individuals, each with an extended history of resistance to speech. The support comes in eight different dimensions: linguistic, metacognitive, developmental, resourceful, social and cultural, emotional, psychological, and individualised support (Figure 6.4). 6.7.1

Linguistic Support: Scaffolding Learners’ Verbal Incompetence

• Create a moment of repeating words, phrases, and sentences to familiarise students without loud utterances. • Organise for students to verbally recycle the language they have learned. • Invite students to write down topics whose vocabulary they are comfortable with. • Provide linguistic support in context and get students to use such support in verbal communication.

Linguistic

Metacognitive

Developmental

Emotional

SUPPORT Resourceful Psychological

Social & cultural

Individualised

Figure 6.4 Support provided for learners’ verbal participation

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• Be critical of the syllabus and make attempts to adapt it. • Link the lesson to students in a personal way by allowing part of the lesson to develop from student talk. • Organise a gradual shift from easy to demanding tasks. 6.7.2

Meta-Cognitive Support: Showing Learners How to Participate

• Find out why students need to learn English and openly discuss their learning goal and the rules of classroom participation (which can be obtained through a survey and through conversations with students during or outside of class time). • Set up participation rules whereby everyone’s contribution is welcome and no one is wrong. • Organise for students to have a say in how they should learn and be taught. • Allow shy students to keep a low profile by exchanging ideas with peers, giving choral responses, and leaving a little time for responding preparation. • Allow very insecure and weaker students to use a visual prompt. • Establish explicit rules for volunteers. • Facilitate performance by setting smaller and more realistic goals considering students’ abilities. • Avoid grammatical correction when students use English for communication. • Share new rules of participation together with their rationale. • Be clear to students that their contribution is welcome and appreciated. • Allow grammatical mistakes and only provide corrections at the end of the lesson. Let students know this. • Make it clear that the new methods have been built upon the students’ ideas and suggestions, and that they are now being applied for their benefit. • Inform students that the nature of this experiment is teamwork, therefore it needs their generous cooperation. • Try out a wide range of eliciting techniques such as putting students in pairs or groups, using hand gestures, encouraging volunteers, getting peers to share ideas, using students’ names, inviting participation through individual eye contact, and providing easy tasks before moving to more difficult ones. 6.7.3

Developmental Support: Monitoring Learner Progress

• Focus on learner progress: helping students make progress in language proficiency (which would require some time and effort from both the teacher and students). • Occasionally use students’ ideas for further discussion to make them feel they are playing a significant part in the classroom process.

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• Regularly assess students’ progress and make comparisons with previous performance to illuminate every small success. • Direct attention to students’ participating effort rather than to speech perfection. • Encourage student–student relationships by organising small-group activities. • Explain to students the benefits of cooperative tasks. • Allow one activity to include different tasks at different levels of challenge, in which reluctant students can play a more manageable role. • Gradually guide students through specific steps, with more intensive support at first and with more challenge when participation shows signs of increasing. • Accept and acknowledge even minimal amounts of student participation. 6.7.4

Resourceful Support: Providing Materials That Make Learning Fun and Easy

• Enhance the quality of resources: making learning materials more interesting (which is the ability to redesign or adapt tasks to suit the learner personality, interest, and cultural values). • Provide generous support with hints, clues, and suggestions. • Keep the lecturing mode to a minimum. 6.7.5

Social and Cultural Support: Fostering Learner Desire to Communicate

• Organise more teamwork and make it fun so that students enjoy each other’s company and feel that the class is like a family. • Build a good teacher–learner relationship through friendly conversation during the lesson. • Be explicit about the need to break the silent norms. • Encourage student–student relationships by organising small-group activities. • Explain to students the benefits of cooperative tasks. • Accept unplanned discourse and be willing to sacrifice parts of the syllabus in exchange for authentic communication. • Bring classroom discussion closer to students’ knowledge and experience. • Gear lesson content towards their respective cultures and societies where possible. • Choose diverse discussion topics, considering learner needs.

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6.7.6

Emotional Support: Helping Learners Feel Good in the Classroom

• Working on inspiration: make teaching styles more inspiring (through enhancement of personal charisma; through the development of sensitivity towards learners’ emotional and sociocultural needs; through pedagogical and psychological knowledge; through motivational skills). • Create more laughter in the classroom and incorporate activities that encourage fun. • Welcome student contributions with warmth and respect. • Whenever possible, praise the content of student contribution or even the attempt itself. • Be more cheerful and relaxed with students, even if it means having to modify your personality to make it more approachable. 6.7.7

Psychological Support: Caring about Learners’ Mental Health Including a Well-Functioning Mind

• Building respect: connecting student participation with individual esteem (such as looking impressed or appreciative when silent students speak, giving positive evaluation, praising them for good efforts, showing respect to their ideas, and using student contribution for further interaction). • Vary classroom activity types to ensure that every learning moment is fresh. • As a teacher, be a good human through warmth, kindness, modesty, sincerity, support, light-heartedness, and self-criticism. • As a teacher, develop respect for and cultural sensitivity to differences, and a basic understanding of the psychology of learning styles. • Avoid eliciting public performance by force. • Warmly accept and value students’ contributions. • Connect student contribution with pleasant feelings, e.g. by praising and assessing it positively. • Listen to students attentively and interact appropriately so that they know you acknowledge their attempt to communicate. • Be energetic and avoid giving the impression of filling time in the classroom. 6.7.8

Individualised Support

• Get to know students more personally (such as remembering their names, hobbies, habits, efforts, progress, and needs). • Remember students’ names and maintain eye contact equally across all students. • Keep track of every student’s progress and learning challenges.

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• Find out why students need to learn English and openly discuss their learning goal and the rules of classroom participation (which can be obtained through a survey and through conversations with students during or outside of class time). • Patiently utilise what students know rather than forcing them to perform what they don’t know. No strategies are inherently effective but will need to be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness for the individual learner in the completion of the language task at hand (Cohen, 1998). Each of these strategies, first, would need to be attuned to the context and the challenges in every setting. For example, one strategy under meta-cognitive support mentions that rules are to be re-established and might require a discussion between the teacher and students rather than coming from the teacher alone. As Gibson and Chandler (1988) observe, rules should not be stated simply as orders, and it is also important to explain the reasons behind the rules to the class. According to Bedell and Oxford (1996), although many learners often feel uncomfortable when diverging from certain norms that are culturally approved, negotiation can help them see the value in new methods that are not necessarily within the limits of their cultural norms. Due to the specificity of every context and every teacher’s ability, the strategies need to be practised, reflected on, shared with colleagues, and discussed in detail to be refined and improved. Besides, the strategies need to be introduced into preservice teachers’ placement programmes for a thorough discussion. Finally, they also must be incorporated into in-service teachers’ professional development programmes for teaching innovations, reports, and follow-up analysis. The above list can be used at teacher development workshops where teachers can tick the strategies that they have employed before and share the efficiency of those choices. They can also tick the ones that they hardly ever used, find ways to try them out in a lesson, and report the outcome to colleagues. Alternatively, teachers can identify the dimensions of support that they are naturally good at as well as the areas that they have not paid adequate attention to so they can make efforts to focus more on them. For example, some teachers tend to focus on the academic aspect of helping students learn but might express less interest in boosting students’ emotional and psychological well-being. Understanding how learners feel is much more important than just seeing how they learn or behave, bearing in mind that, in Holliday’s (1994, p. 7) words, ‘all teachers are outsiders to the cultures of their students’. 6.8

Concluding Insights

It must be acknowledged that, given the differences inherent in participants’ learning and teaching styles, the strategies introduced here may work with some and not with others. How effective a strategy is depends on many factors,

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such as the nature of the language task as well as the individual learner, personalities, activities, and competencies. Trying out some of these suggestions helps expand pedagogical options to assist learners who struggle with undesirable silence. Unwanted silence, however, does not need to transform into speech but can also transform into silence for productive thought-processing. As Stables (1995) reflects, while classroom ‘discussion stimulates thought, it is also stimulated by thought, and a noisy classroom is sometimes the very worst place to think’ (p. 68). If students practise passive and useless silence, they are likely to continue practising passive and useless speech when they are forced to talk. It is not logical to expect someone with low-quality thinking to demonstrate highquality speaking. It is even more absurd to move someone from poor thought to poor speech and then call that evidence of learning. This is because, if the mind of a person is empty, the sound they make from that mind will also be empty, except that those sounds might give the teacher the illusion of progress. Once we are aware of this, instead of making students speak out at any cost, it might be more helpful to guide them through productive use of silence first. Then, when these students become more verbal, their participation is likely to be meaningful. In a word, there are two available options for every learner. One is to speak exploratively for the sake of uttering words; two is using silence productively so that verbal output can contain some meaningful content.

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7

Online Silence

The rapid rise of online learning has disturbed education in complex ways, to the extent that many teachers struggle awkwardly to handle student learning. During the pandemic alone, 1.37 billion students and 60 million teachers moved from the classroom to the computer screen (UNESCO, 2020). Ever since, online learning platforms have been reported to rise consistently (Cooke, 2022). Unlike many animals that can migrate across enormous distances innately without a compass, humans need to be taught to do so. Yet not everyone has the skills ready for the task. The sudden change has seriously troubled the nature of interaction, collaboration, access to instruction, and the whole social environment. If online education was a choice before the pandemic, that is not quite the case anymore. When classes do not physically meet on a routine basis, there emerges unpredictable delays in student learning, a constant sense of quietness, that may not be easily interpreted. The chapter addresses this realistic concern by unpacking what is happening when teachers and students do not seem to hear from each other during every course of study. My fieldnotes based on conversations with colleagues reflect the challenge of coping with online communication: I cannot see what my students are working on. There is no way to tell if they are satisfied, upset, confused, or diligent. I can only send messages, announcements, and suggestions on the forum space, but when there is no response, I keep wondering what is going wrong. I try to be cheerful during virtual lessons by occasionally telling personal anecdotes or cracking a joke, but no one laughs or says much. I don’t get to see facial expressions as my students tend to show profile images of pets or flowers while most of them keep silent. Tutorials become lectures and jokes become dry. I wish I knew how to manage these problems. Sometimes, I find myself saying hopeless things that I normally would not say in a real classroom, such as: Can you hear me? Excuse me, your microphone is mute. Oh, your voice is breaking up. I’m afraid my network is not functioning. Mike, are you there? What is that 105

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noise, somebody please mute your mic for a sec? Sorry, my breakout function doesn’t work. I think we have done quite a good job of going online. I try to keep my lecture to maximum one hour with a break in the middle so that my students won’t feel tired. However, it is hard to follow student progress when I don’t hear from them and don’t meet them in person in the classroom. Drawn extensively from the research discourse on the occurrence and absence of learner participation together with my observations, the chapter outlines how silence pervades the digital educational environment. The discussion first defines the meaning of online silence and examines how online instruction provokes silence. Secondly, the dynamic of silence is unpacked concerning both learning engagement and learning disengagement in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. Thirdly, it is argued that online silence exhibits two opposing impacts by being both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. The chapter embraces online silence in language learning and in subject-content education considering that learners need to develop not only language proficiency but also knowledge and skills for real-world communication. 7.1

Identifying the Concept

How we define online silence varies according to teachers’ different levels of patience when waiting for learner response. Sometimes a few seconds can be unbearable but twenty-four hours seem fine. A teacher who waits a few seconds after raising a question might accuse the class of being too slow. A teacher who waits one day after initiating an online discussion thread may feel all right with this interval. Such diverse cases suggest that online silence does not have a consistent timeframe; being both a personal and a situationist phenomenon, silence might last from a few seconds to infinity. In a face-to-face classroom, a teacher who feels disturbed by unwanted silences can attempt to summon participation by making eye contact, nominating speakers, using hand gestures, saying encouraging words, sharing a joke to inspire openness, having everyone walk around and chat, or introducing a kinaesthetic warm-up activity, among other strategies. Such improvisation, unfortunately, might not happen easily in a digital space. Especially when most of the class remains invisible behind their deactivated microphones and cameras, some teachers might feel that they are teaching in the dark. Some scholars observe that discussion experiences delay when it causes impatience or ruins the flow of exchange (Hewitt, 2005; Kalman, 2008). This explanation, however, fails to specify when impatience is well justified or how

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an exchange is disrupted. Although some argue that impatience is justified when student responses are not quick enough, generating an undesirable waiting time for everybody in that setting (Liu & Ginther, 2002; Walther & Bunz, 2005), it seems impossible to identify the length of such waiting in all contexts since every academic circumstance has its expectation regarding the structure and timing of student contribution. Troubled by such complications, researchers have made efforts to document responsiveness norms, that is, what teachers and students conceptualise as a reasonable amount of wait time for various learning events (Kalman et al., 2007). Based on this, it is then argued that when such norms are violated, unpleasant silence is considered to occur; otherwise, silence would be a natural behaviour. For example, if a discussion thread requires responses by a deadline of five days, then it should be normal for the teachers to wait for four days. In this case, the fact that students remain quiet for four days should not be regarded as unresponsiveness but must be understood as preparation for participation or a ‘task in progress’. Silence, based on the above understanding, can be natural or wrong. Silence can be seen as negotiation to move forward or passivity that prevents proceeding. In many cases, instead of occurring at the beginning of a topic initiation or as a response to a question, silence might happen in the middle of a conversation, that is, when a dialogue stops developing. A discussion thread dies prematurely under conditions such as: • when a thread becomes poor in quality and ceases to evolve • when students lose interest and have no more to say • when a debate becomes so confrontational that it seems too stressful to argue further • when the content moves off the intended topic and snowballs pointlessly • when contributions grow dull for simply stating the obvious or becoming prone to mere approval • when the teacher posts a concluding comment that seems to close the case. These circumstances of silence, which are complex and unpredictable, may stem from unintended situations, teacher lack of management, and learner lack of worthwhile ideas to share. 7.2

Scholarly Attitudes towards Online Silence

There are three different attitudes towards the nature of online silence, namely that it is a productive learning process, an unproductive learning process, or a mysterious process that needs attending to on a case-by-case basis (Figure 7.1). Some studies reveal online silence to be unhelpful behaviour by highlighting it as a violation of acceptable responsive norms (Kalman et al., 2007), responsive delay (Petrides, 2002), slow feedback (Vonderwell, 2003), or

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Productive

ONLINE SILENCE

• Sense of belonging • Continuity • Accessing materials • Staying on-tasks

Unproductive

Mysterious

• Disruption of contact • Low involvement • Poor engagement • Unstable attendance

• Moody participation • Waiting without a plan • Visibility • Unclear communication

Figure 7.1 The conceptualisation of online silence

confusion and uncomfortable feelings (Kalman, 2008). Other studies find online silence a natural part of the learning process that should be accepted and guided rather than disapproved of. Research by Duran (2020) on students’ online learning experiences discovers that learner voice can be fully or partially expressed and, when it is withheld, such silence can be thoughtful and has a purpose rather than always representing a flaw in participation. Productive online silence occurs when teacher–student communication seems efficient and students are aware of how to study. Even when they do not speak or write in time, their heart and mind focus on learning: they access materials to read them and stay on task. The teacher allows silence after knowing that learning is taking place and that the output will be followed up in due course. Students behave like a train heading in the right direction. Unlike face-to-face classroom settings where students can easily develop a sense of belonging (Wenger, 1998), participation in a virtual environment is highly subject to delay and disruption. To help students use productive silence, the teacher must manage their delay time by making sure it has a purpose (Freire, 2003; Vanberschot, 2004). Such management, according to Hrastinski (2008), involves accessing e-learning materials, posting comments, joining forum discussions, responding to others, fulfilling given tasks, studying instructions,

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raising questions, exchanging feedback, and so on. To organise productive silence in a virtual classroom teaching requires teachers to optimise the use of these engagement forms with clear instructions, procedures, deadlines, and follow-up discussions. Unproductive online silence, on the contrary, happens when students are not actively responsive to instructions, resources, and the study plan. They attend online classes irregularly, fail to treat the learning process with enthusiasm, and care more about getting through the assignments for grades. Their silence is the result of being off-task. Students behave like a train going in the wrong direction. Silence is unhelpful if students stay in low contact with others, demonstrate limited presence (Turner, 2011), are careless or unclear in written communication (Agyekum, 2002), neglect to give feedback to others (Walther, 2011), and do not respond to the voice of peers (Mico-Wentworth, 2014). Hrastinski (2008) identifies online participation as a synchronous and asynchronous process of maintaining relations with others through learning efforts. Mysterious online silence, in the meantime, represents ambiguous or confusing behaviour as students seem reluctant to participate in study and communication with others. Their behaviour can be moody and difficult to understand. They might post responses to a discussion in one week and suddenly stop their involvement in the subsequent week without an explanation. They lurk around, waiting to build interest without any promise of engagement, having no clear plan, slowly observing the process, letting time pass by, and feeling uncertain about how to learn. Students behave like a train that stops moving but sometimes turns on the engine without a clear reason for doing so. Such reluctant students are sometimes portrayed as lurkers (Sproull & Faraj, 1997; Nonnecke & Preece, 2000), who observe for some time before responding. Fairly speaking, this stance is not merely a personal decision but might come from factors such as unclear instructions, challenging reading materials, the cognitive demand of the topic, the time needed for reflection, and the thought-provoking or uninteresting nature of peer posts. Teacher ability to manage these areas is essential, including sensitivity to student needs, the ability to reorganise the rules of participation, timely and helpful feedback, and strategies to keep everyone in touch regularly and sufficiently. Even though students might not participate well at first, if they respond to teacher efforts their initial delay can become productive silence. The types of silence above are not fixed but might vary as the setting and pedagogy are modified. For example, empirical research shows that, while native speakers are more expressive in the real classroom, non-native English speakers display more interactive competence in written electronic media (Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995; Sotillo, 2000). Many of my international students who hardly participate in a face-to-face classroom can be more active on social

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platforms. They write constantly in blogs and apps and keep their posts alive. This sociable behaviour is fairly common practice and has been documented by case study research in which students write in English and other languages they know well (see, for example, Lee, 2011). Such evidence shows that students are not consistently silent but behave according to whether their needs are recognised. When the situation is safe and enjoyable, they will take the initiative to share ideas without being asked to do so. In some classrooms, the climate seems formal, dull, stressful, and even fear-provoking. It would be unreasonable to expect students to communicate freely in such situations and blame them for being passive when they simply resist poor pedagogy. When good conditions are provided, they would be willing to modify their performance and remake their identities (Lewis, Enciso & Moje, 2007). Ways of encouraging online participation and reducing unproductive online silence include the use of personalised content to inspire student responses (Betts, 2009), verbal immediacy such as friendly ways of commenting on student contribution (Furlich, 2013), and systematic training of teachers before they embark on virtual teaching space (Betts, 2011). 7.3

Some Challenging Characteristics of Online Learning

This section discusses some inherent conditions of online learning that tend to trigger and prolong learner silence. An extended body of literature indicates that online education is more physically isolating and resisant to interaction, engagement, and bonding (Dyrud, 2000; Angelino, Williams & Natvig, 2007; Glazier, 2016). The discourse also highlights that e-learning seems easier for independent learners with a strong sense of self-efficacy who know how to manage their responsibilities (Diaz & Cartnal, 1999; Blocher et al., 2002; Bell & Akroyd, 2006; Ryan & Deci, 2017). For an overview of how silence occurs and persists in online learning, let us look at a few features that make e-learning more demanding than conventional classrooms. Containing many challenges, however, does not necessarily mean low effectiveness but simply implies that digital education requires different skills from face-to-face education. As far as efficacy is concerned, research shows that both modes of learning can reach equally ideal outcomes (Robertson, Grant & Jackson, 2005; Maki & Maki, 2007). Although the literature has identified a wide range of benefits of e-learning such as increasing access to education and expanding students’ global experiences, among many others (Bell & Federman, 2013; Dixson, 2015), researchers can hardly find any evidence to suggest that online learning enhances verbal participation. Instead, digital learning is known for triggering a lack of speech. In this regard, there are at least four areas of challenge that frequently provokes silence. They include the absence of non-verbal cues, the inherent delay in student participation, the

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pressure on teachers to perform multiple new roles, and the occurrence of digital boredom. 7.3.1

The Absence of Non-Verbal Cues

Body language on the screen does not work in the same way as in real life. In the physical world, someone being stared at for a few seconds will notice and attend to what is going on. In a virtual class, however, someone being intensely observed for an hour would have absolutely no idea. Such obscurity of nonverbal cues prevents teachers from recognising nuances of student behaviour such as levels of interest or boredom. One cannot tell if students are taking notes or simply listening. Posture, eye contact, and facial expression are not easy to read. Disenabled cameras and muted microphones make it impossible to notice student attention. Many subtle gestures that enrich communication now vanish: a giggle of amusement, a throat-clearing sound for attention, a humming tone for a speaking turn, hand clapping for support, or a marvelling ‘wow’ to show surprise. Other sounds associated with the human mood are also absent: the rustling sound of turned pages, a marker running on the whiteboard, a breeze blowing through the open window signalling pleasant weather. All these problems contribute to what Mico-Wentworth (2014) refers to as a ‘lack of presence’ (p. 3). The gathering of people in a virtual room often looks like a GIF image with only basic animations. Some students take advantage of this feature to get out of fully attending the class. I had a student who used a screenshot of him sitting in front of the screen listening attentively to my lecture as his profile image. Not until I called on him to answer a question did I realise I was merely communicating with a portrait while the real person was elsewhere, probably eating breakfast or watching a movie. Online communication is also subject to less intimacy. The teacher cannot walk around and exhibit personal chemistry. Dramatic improvisation seems hard to achieve. For example, students cannot exchange looks of mutual understanding or bewilderment; they can neither whisper private, playful thoughts to adjacent peers nor celebrate awesome ideas with a cool high five. I have seen some of the most humorous teachers make the most hilarious puns during a virtual class, yet nobody seemed to laugh, except one or two who gave a faint smile or smirk. When all bodily cues disappear, the social atmosphere is stamped with a plainness that one must learn to accept and get used to. Without physical expressions, the interpretation of online silence becomes so difficult that some teachers cannot help developing a negative impression about it. Because of this, online silence is often internalised by teachers as poor engagement, lack of personal connection (Mico-Wentworth, 2014), and a cause of misunderstanding (Agyekum, 2002; Betts, 2009). According to social presence theory, online communication has a depersonalising nature whereby

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individuals struggle to build personal relationships with each other (Griffin, 2009). This hypothesis, however, does not have to be true in all kinds of digital education but is conditional according to contexts and teaching abilities. In practice, both support and disapproval towards online education continue to exist side by side. While some scholars perceive computer-mediated communication as inferior to face-to-face communication (Walther, 2011; Keller, 2013), others point out the benefits of virtual settings as supporting conventional classes (Furlich, 2013); a catalyst for further education research (Betts, 2011); a way of renewing social presence (Turner, 2011; Walther, 2011); increased connection (Gautreau, 2012); and a tool for learning absorption, reflection, and respect (Fivush, 2010), among others. Along this line, Zembylas and Vrasidas (2007), who research different meanings of online silence, discover that not all instances of silence carry an undesirable connotation. There are, in every class, students who employ silence strategically, alternating between participating and observing according to their changing needs. To sum up, a major difficulty confronting most teachers is the capability to decipher when student silence is an integral part of task performance and when that is not the case. 7.3.2

Latency in Student Response and Participation

Research in online education has looked at responsiveness norms, that is, how much silent time students in a specific context expect to have when responding to tasks, such as forum posting or assignment submission. Latency is then identified as the time students take that stretches beyond such expectations and causes anxiety to the teacher for not knowing why students are so slow. For example, a large-scale project by Kalman et al. (2007), which explores long response latencies during email communication, recognises online silence as a violation of the average waiting norm. Arguably, the length of waiting in asynchronous discussion is highly contextdependent, being contingent upon the preparation time needed and on the respective deadline or the challenge level of every task. Based on such needs, silence can be reasonable or unreasonable. Zembylas and Vrasidas (2007) through ethnographic observation point out that silence can be a built-in part of social presence rather than a lack of it. In synchronous discussion, however, it is noticed that non-participation or a delay in communication might arise from students’ insecurity or misunderstanding for not receiving as clear visual clues as they would find in traditional classes (Vonderwell & Zachariah, 2005). For this reason, if materials originally developed for face-to-face settings are now placed on virtual platforms, they must be modified to suit the online dynamics. For example, task requirements must be elaborated in detailed written instructions for students to read whenever they want. Students must be given time to develop

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a strong relationship with learning materials, as recommended by Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez (2019) through research on student learning needs. 7.3.3

The Pressure on Teachers to Perform Multiple New Roles

Compared with face-to-face settings, online education witnesses more learner reliance on the teacher. This is because, as drawn from studies of many e-learning programmes, teaching in digital space pressurises the instructor to expand their roles, serving not just as a pedagogist but also as an administrator, a technician, a digital task designer, a counsellor (Bawane & Spector, 2009; Munoz-Carril, Gonzalez Sanmamed & Hernandez-Selles, 2013; Baran & Correia, 2014), a community leader, and, ideally, an online entertainer. All these responsibilities demand considerable amounts of extra hours, enthusiasm, thoughts, and management skills. If some of these roles remain unfulfilled, students might struggle to learn and become less responsive. One common example of such extended commitment is when the teacher needs to make a video recording of a lecture. If the lecture is supposed to last an hour, the recording task with its preparations and rehearsal (including lesson planning, visual illustrations, and multiple recordings to repair errors) might take several days. Depending on their individual experience and skills, teacher workload may increase enormously to facilitate easy learning and to keep student satisfaction from dropping. Empirical evidence shows that many teachers suffer from low tolerance of students’ withdrawal from class participation (Kozar, 2016; Querol-Julián & Arteaga-Martínez, 2019). In many cases, learner silence does not mean a refusal to participate but comes from a struggle in trying to cope with course requirements without timely support. The discourse has documented scenarios where teachers who lack technological skills and online teaching experience fail to cope with silence in learning and teaching (Lenkaitis, 2020; Cheung, 2021). McBrien, Cheng, and Jones (2009) contend that activities displayed on a computer screen are qualitatively different from physical experiences, demanding different abilities from both teachers and students. 7.3.4

Digital Boredom

In per-semester feedback at the university where I work, students often request more face-to-face classes after they experience emotional disengagement and social miscommunication in online settings. My informal conversations with secondary and university students in Australia demonstrate several noteworthy scenarios which reveal what many students do and how

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they feel when teachers do not hear from them. Below are students’ reflections that I have documented: I try to call, message, and video-chat with my friends when I cannot see them; and part of the discussion is about how to cope with learning difficulties. It is hard to be disconnected from your social circle. Staying home is good too as I can attend to my hobbies. But I no longer have the excitement of going to school, move around, eat, laugh and network with people. My learning world now has only one focus: assignment. Every morning, I wake up, shower, get dressed and go back to my room for assignments. Studying online feels like constant homework. My productivity is not diverse anymore so I easily get bored, tired, and lose curiosity. The best moment of online classes is when I show up early on Zoom and chat with my classmates. But when the teacher shows up, the climate becomes tedious and unexciting. I sometimes disable my camera and microphone to step out of the house and breathe fresh air. A case study by Cheung (2021) on secondary ESL teachers in Hong Kong shows that student silence stems from didactic teaching approaches, heavy syllabuses, and unresolved technological issues. A large-scale study by Derakhshan et al. (2021) of Iranian Zoom classes reveals student frustration with the poor flow of communication due to the abrupt transition from face-toface to digital learning during the pandemic. Although in some Asian cultures, it is advised that learning must persist in the face of boredom (Hess & Azuma, 1991), dullness does not have to be accepted as an inherent, natural part of education but can be confronted. While some students can tolerate monotony and willingly carry on, others switch off from learning when they experience discomfort in it. A study by Sharp et al. (2019) of 179 university students in the UK confirms that academic boredom can cause irritation and depression, in the end damaging motivation, effort, and learning outcome. While online silence has been acknowledged as reflective practice (Hu, 2021), research by Derakhshan et al. (2021) and Wang, Derakhshan, and Zhang (2021) indicates that silence in many cases demonstrates learner resistance to unbearable dreariness. Silence is also caused by the heavily theoretical nature of online materials and the distracting conditions of students’ at-home environments during virtual classes. Research by Adedoyin and Soykan (2020) reveals that individual learning sites with intrusion from housemates, children, or pets can interfere with student concentration and induce low participation. Dullness also arises from the lack of authentic dialogue during asynchronous discussions. Many teachers employ

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a question–reply pattern that tends to make learning mechanical rather than creating a vibrant dialogue environment (Anderson, 2004). Because of this, students become more responsive than proactive, when they are compelled to cope with teacher initiative rather than learning to think independently and formulate their inquiries. 7.3.5

The Challenge to Social Equity

Teaching is a political activity that might grant power to some students and take it away from others. Equity in education refers to the reasonable distribution of conditions for all students to perform their best regardless of their cultural-regional background and socio-economic status. If students do not learn effectively, it should be down to their lack of learning skills and commitment rather than a weak internet connection or inadequate access to resources. To ensure fairness, it is important to understand how online and offline learning conditions shape learner engagement differently. Some examples of online conditions include ownership of computers, virtual streaming quality, facilities for accessing learning materials, circumstantial distractions, family support, physical conditions at home, occupational situations, technological skills, affordable digital tools, and individual prior experiences with online work. In some contexts, students do not have a computer at home and having to travel to campus for this facility is a time-consuming routine (Asoodar et al., 2014). Besides, the difference between on-screen and offscreen concentration abilities is a rarely recognised issue. A study by Ezra et al. (2021) on Israeli university students’ experiences shows that some students can focus well for hours in a real classroom but suffer from a headache when their eyes are continuously exposed to a computer screen. Some of my students in online programmes say they dearly miss the convenience of making friends in a physical classroom during break time when they can drink coffee together, organise a farewell party, and create group photos as a reminder of fond memories. On their graduation day, when the students were asked what moments in their university years were beautiful and memorable, they shared a diverse range of incidents but, sadly, none mentioned any e-learning reminiscence. Since it seemed that most laughter and tears happened in the physical rather than a digital classroom, education research might need to investigate how learner affect is facilitated in online settings. Although this is an emerging area of scholarly concern, the outcome has not been satisfactory as the relationship between technology and emotion remains insignificant (Loderer, Pekrun & Lester, 2018; Stephan, Markus & GläserZikuda, 2019). Although the current discourse often highlights how digital education increases equity by erasing geographical boundaries, expanding enrolment capacity, and building more collaboration capacity (Mezirow, 2000; Oakes &

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Lipton, 2007), some programmes hurriedly switch to remote delivery to cope with the global pandemic or to compete with other programmes in enrolment numbers. Without adequate preparations, many teachers and students entering the digital mode fail to cope with constraints previously unknown to them. In many cases, online students suffer not because they do not know how to learn but rather due to circumstantial conditions unrelated to academic knowledge and study skills. When this happens, some might withdraw from electronic communication simply because they either feel unsure how to respond or because they do not enjoy responding. This argument is made not to praise the face-to-face mode over e-learning, but only to illuminate how silence occurs in a digital context. 7.4

Dimensions of Online Learning Experiences

Online silence represents both engagement and disengagement in the learning process. Learner engagement embraces intellectual, interpersonal, emotional, behavioural, and technical connections with a course of study. The evidence of engagement is learner willingness to invest quality time, energy, interest, attention, and effort to learn with a clear goal in mind. This definition is inspired by the views of Cole and Chan (1994), Greene, Marti, and McClenney (2008), Krause and Coates (2008), Järvelä, Veermans, and Leinonen (2008), Cocea and Weibelzahl (2011), Nakamaru (2012), and Sun and Rueda (2012) who stress the above concepts and understandings. Engagement is also associated with pleasure in learning (Balwant, 2018) and a readiness to modify behaviour for improvement (Wilson, Broughan & Marselle, 2019). If students keep quiet but are performing some of these learning roles, their silence should be regarded as one of engagement. The chart below outlines four areas of learner engagement as drawn from both the definition above and my observation of how the concept of engagement operates in learning across many contexts. Each of those dimensions is coupled with concrete examples commonly found in everyday learning. Arguably, every student enters online education, including variations such as blended and flexible learning, with at least these four dimensions of engagement (Figure 7.2). 7.5

Two Directions of Online Silence

Undesirable silence occurs when students experience trouble in any of the above dimensions. Examples of such trouble include struggling to comprehend learning content, failing to answer a question (cognitive problems), not communicating with teachers and peers (social problems), feeling bored with a teaching method (affective problems), and not utilising online resources (technical problems). Any of these issues can disrupt learner response and display uncomfortable silence.

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Cognitive engagement

Social engagement

Affective engagement

Digital learning engagement

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• Taking notes of important points (documentation) • Understanding and absorbing knowledge (mental processing) • Thinking about issues of interest (reflection) • Formulating responses to issues and answers to questions (preparation) • Asking questions to challenge issues or clarify ideas (consolidation) • Forming pairs and groups (collaboration) • Sharing ideas with peers (mutual learning) • Feeling a sense of belonging (rapport) • Establishing a routine to stay in touch (communication) • Joining class discussion and contributing to knowledge (participation) • Being interested in the lesson topic (attention) • Exploring lesson content more thoroughly (curiosity) • Feeling happy with the classroom process and not getting bored (enjoyment) • Looking forward to learning more (motivation) • Learning with confidence and trust (satisfaction) • Being able to retrieve learning materials easily (accessibility) • Seeing how learning is structured through technology (awareness) • Communicating at ease with peers and teachers through forum posts and other tools (community) • Being familiar with digital learning norms (expectation) • Knowing where to obtain information and ask questions (keeping track)

Figure 7.2 Dimensions of online learning experiences

Desirable silence occurs in the same dimensions, that is, when students practise mental processing, prepare ideas for sharing, listen to lectures, reflect on issues (cognitive connection), relate well to others (social connection), enjoy the learning process (affective connection), and improve digital learning skills (technical connection). Signs of productive versus unproductive silence, however, are hard to see if there is no clear communication from students and if the teacher fails to recognise what lies behind the quiet behaviour. Indeed, the current discourse has widely acknowledged teachers’ inability to understand and deal with online silence (Benfield, 2000; Beaudoin, 2002; Xin & Feenberg, 2006; Gradinaru, 2016). Based on the above realities, online silence falls into two types, namely painful silence and helpful silence, each of which can be subdivided into four dimensions namely cognitive, social, affective, and digital learning engagement (Table 7.1). Altogether, the picture reveals eight different manners of online silence that educators might need to be aware of. The word choice ‘painful’ only has a relative meaning, that is, it does not necessarily represent the emotion of all teachers since there may be those who simply accept or ignore this feeling as a fact of life. While painful silence can be toned down as undesirable, negative, useless, or unhelpful silence, it can be identified as ‘pain’ for causing a headache to many teachers. Some feel hopeless for not only failing to understand why students do not cooperate but also finding silence agonising as it persistently disrupts their positive teaching intentions.

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Table 7.1 Types of online silence

PAINFUL SILENCE

HELPFUL SILENCE

cognitive social affective digital learning cognitive social affective digital learning

7.6

Painful Online Silence

7.6.1

Silence As Cognitive Disengagement

disengagement

engagement

Cognitive disengagement refers to unsustained intellectual practice, such as learning poorly, failing to cope with course content, struggling to comprehend knowledge, and being unable to acquire skills. Students who suffer from these challenges reduce their response to activities and communicate less with teachers and peers. Empirical evidence shows that students learn little when an online forum seems uninteresting and superficial (Wang, 2010; Lopera Medina, 2014). Course quality drops in the face of dull discussion content, lack of peer discussion, and infrequent teacher feedback. Besides, the same computer screen that serves learning may also reduce learning efficiency. An investigation by Zhang and Han (2012) at a Chinese college discovers that some students become distracted easily through their random, goal-disoriented use of the Internet. Many find it difficult to develop English skills online and preferred to acquire them in a traditional classroom, as found in research by Sun (2014) on online English courses. Brain capacity decreases not only when students lose track of knowledge but also when learning content is excessive. A study by Vonderwell and Zachariah (2005) of students in an American university discovers that when the reading load surpasses what one can handle, responding to materials becomes a stressful task. Many lecturers overlook the fact that reading is not just about absorbing texts but, more importantly, about what comes after the text, such as reading peers’ posts and teachers’ instructions to act upon these. Heavy workload and unanticipated pressure might damage the pleasure of learning as it occupies the time and effort that could otherwise be used for deep reflection to turn into participation. If intense interaction with materials is coupled with burdensome follow-up requirements, mental disorientation will result and take away learner self-confidence to engage with the course. Besides, when the learning content seems impractical – that is, having little to do with real-world

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applications – students might fail to make any connection and become unresponsive, as found in a study by Zhou (2021) on learner perception and experience. 7.6.2

Silence As Social Disengagement

A feeling of isolation might emerge, which can easily develop into lonely silence, if students cannot sense the presence of teachers and peers, including not seeing their faces, not knowing their backgrounds, not receiving any welcome activities, not being guided to interact, and not understanding clearly what to do during a course of study. A study by Duran (2020) on a graduate programme at a Canadian university demonstrates that students do influence each other in behaviour. If many students in a virtual class seem too quiet, others might be influenced by this norm and instinctively practise it. Research by Adams and van Manen (2006) also shows that students who try to share ideas without receiving any peer response easily feel devalued and become reluctant to contribute again. When articulate students in a class frequently experience this unpleasant feeling of ‘speaking to a wall’, they might end up being as silent as all the others. When this happens and lasts for some time, the atmosphere of the class would develop into a collective inertia that is not easily mended. Social communication might experience resistance in a virtual setting. Research by O’Shea, Stone, and Delahunty (2015) on Australian university students’ perceptions shows that some students do not have a desire to communicate with peers at all, claiming that such communication does not bring benefits, but only wish to learn from the teacher. The same study reveals that many students feel nervous when their lecturer seems to disappear and does not respond to their needs. Some examples of students’ arising needs include struggling to access readings, waiting anxiously for feedback on their work, asking questions on the forum or by email without receiving a timely answer, and experiencing a problem and sounding it out without hearing a solution, among other scenarios. In the meanwhile, lecturers also struggle to communicate with all the students within their available time. I have seen instructors who, because of their heavy teaching loads, have little time left to reply to student questions that seem to arrive too often. On top of that, they need to prepare weekly lessons, announcements, recordings, and virtual classes. In this dilemma, students who are not satisfied with inadequate support will provide negative feedback at the end of the semester. While lecturers make efforts to respond to the best of their availability, students do not feel that their learning needs are well responded to. Discussion questions that require the correct answer would not generate social engagement. This is because once someone has provided the answer,

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others no longer feel the need to engage in the discussion. It is the convergent question itself that eradicates any socialisation attempts in the first place. Along this line, research by Vonderwell, Liang, and Alderman (2007) on student experiences reveals that online discussion must be designed to grow, such as by generating a variety of viewpoints and expanding knowledge, rather than to confirm the status quo or become so repetitive that students soon find there is nothing left to talk about. A study by Bidari (2021) on Nepalese university students reveals a connection between disengaged silence and the student habit of keeping the video function switched off during virtual streaming. The study learns that such inactive use of computer screens denotes students’ selfisolation, which poses a barrier to vibrant learning. Arguably, individuals who choose to remain invisible to teachers and peers are often those who resist a learner-centred approach but accept a conventional lecture. 7.6.3

Silence As Affective Disengagement

In a recent large-scale national survey of 1,200 teachers conducted by the University of Melbourne in Australia, 58 per cent of respondents expressed worries about students’ emotional well-being. One teacher said in a follow-up interview (Ziebell et al., 2020, p. 7): Adolescent people are not designed to work or learn in isolation from their friends and peers. I am not concerned at all about academic progress. Good teaching will soon fill any gaps created by online teaching, and teachers that I work with have done incredibly well at adapting to the online environment. It is the social-emotional wellbeing of our young people, particularly those at risk in their homes, that is my biggest concern.

A systematic review of recent literature on technology in language learning by Bedenlier et al. (2020) reports research evidence in East Asian contexts of how effective engagement drops far below cognitive engagement. This is mainly due to student frustration with technology that does not seem to make communication easy. Sometimes, when a discussion seems to have a high-stakes nature (such as being assessed for grades), students become too nervous to share their candid thoughts. A chat can be relaxed, that is, causing no emotional stress or judgement, when it is about how one spent a weekend or whether one finds the weekly reading materials useful. On the contrary, high-stakes content can be, for example, how students feel about the instructor’s ways of teaching or how they cope with a final assignment. To share these critical ideas may be risky since it is not easy to tell the instructor to change their way of teaching or to complain that the assignment requirement is unreasonable. Other examples of high-stakes participation may be a theoretical discussion that, if they are not cautious in expressing their views, might cause individuals to look incompetent in front of everyone else. Along this line, research by Mattsson, Karlsson, and

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Lindström (2008) and Mico-Wentworth (2014) reveals that it is the risk of causing offence, embarrassment, judgement, and misunderstanding that can severely discourage contribution. While social disengagement is related to the loss of interpersonal connection with teachers and peers, affective disengagement is the tension within a person in the form of self-judgement and personal preferences. Research by Duran (2020), for example, discovers that while verbal learners prefer peers who are similar to them, quiet learners often welcome peers that are opposite to them. While highly articulate individuals are not happy working with silent classmates, silent learners enjoy being paired with talkative partners. Peer bonding, however, seems to develop more effectively in an actual classroom than in a virtual environment (Asoodar et al., 2014). As research shows, online learning if not well organised can intimidate a friendly relationship and generate negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, shame, frustration, indifference, and hopelessness (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun, Elliot & Maier, 2009), all of which must not be underestimated in any online programme as they constantly impact on student engagement. 7.6.4

Silence Resulting from Technical Disengagement

An extended body of research has documented technological challenges that cause frustration in students’ learning experience (see, for example, Ducate, Anderson & Moreno, 2011). Some examples of such incidents are unstable functions in Google Docs (Lin & Yang, 2013); conceptual templates and visual presentations that interfere with readability (Asoodar et al., 2014); failure in accessing learning materials (Mejia, 2016); late submission of assignment tasks for technological reasons (Bedenlier et al., 2020); slow interaction due to technological problems (Lopera Medina, 2014); misunderstanding of the tone in messages (Yildiz, 2009); and fear of participation due to fear of recording and judgement (Zhou, 2021), among other issues. A study by Zhou (2021) on learner perspectives also reveals that some students keep silent as they lose track of what is going on because of poor communication. The cognitive, social, affective, and digital learning difficulties mentioned above do not necessarily keep students in complete silence. In every class, there can be students who voice complaints, seek help, ask questions, and request feedback, which means that they do wish to express themselves rather than withdraw from the interaction. Such articulation, however, seems to focus more on the logistic and technological aspects of their study than on the actual course content. In many cases, online silence occurs when students spend more time and effort resolving problems than attending to their actual study. Along this line, research by Tamim et al. (2011) illuminates that technology, if not effectively used, can severely interfere with the learning process and cause

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disengagement. On the contrary, online discussion activities if well organised can multiply student involvement, enhance participation, and allow more ideas to be heard (Zhang and Han, 2012). 7.7

Helpful Online Silence

7.7.1

Silence As Cognitive Engagement

In an investigation that I have conducted on my classes over the years, students who speak frequently and those who speak little are compared in their levels of cognitive engagement. To do this, I draw a continuum of speech and silence on which I line up names of individuals who are highly articulate near the ‘speech’ end (on the left). Likewise, I line up names of very quiet students near the ‘silence’ end of the continuum (on the right). When it comes to reading the students’ essays, I then create another continuum with the left end being ‘creative/critical thinking’ and the right end being ‘superficial thinking/knowledge regurgitation’. I then line up names of students along this continuum according to these characteristics. After that, I compare the two continuums to see if the names on the left end of both continuums are the same. If student names displayed on both continuums are similar, I could conclude that the more verbal the students are, the more creative their thinking is, and vice versa. My purpose in doing this is to see whether the most verbal students are the most creative thinkers while silent learners are the least creative thinkers. I have kept doing this over the semesters for many years at my university to gain knowledge of student abilities rather than aiming for a generalisable quantitative study. Two findings came out of such informal research attempts. First, there are hardly patterns denoting the superiority of highly articulate students over their less verbal counterparts: there are intelligent, competent thinkers in both groups. Second, occasionally some particularly quiet students seem to have superior competence: they do not wish to participate much but speak only when their ideas seem brilliant. Instead, these individuals save time for more thinking and for sharing thoughts in essay writing. From these investigations, I learned that cognitive processing can be externally or internally practised, with the former through speech and the latter through thinking. Besides, cognitive processing can be low-level or advanced. The former occurs when tasks focus on rules, facts, and theories that are disconnected from real-life applicability. The latter is activated when tasks require critical thinking, problem-solving skills, experience sharing, and knowledge creation. In some cases, cognitive engagement might exist as quiet, solitary work rather than through interaction. For example, some students keep a learning journal to accumulate ideas for posting, discussion, or

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assignment writing. Others feel contented with more witnessing than participating, learning vicariously through the lens of others. Empirical research since the 1990s has acknowledged this phenomenon as a natural part of learning (Fritz, 1997; Sutton, 2001), thoughtful reflection (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2007), alignment with the spirit of the majority (Gradinaru, 2016), and avoidance of unnecessary disagreement (Duran, 2020). A study by Duran (2020) learns that many students practise busy silence by gathering resources, reading course materials, developing ideas, studying forum posts from peers, and preparing to contribute to discussion threads. Some students need to keep silent when they develop more learning autonomy. A 2020 survey conducted across universities in Australia reveals that 22 per cent of respondents say positive things about this mode, mentioning flexible access to learning materials and the self-sufficiency of studying from home. Along this line, one of my students reflects in an optimistic light: I spend less leisure time with my friends now so I can focus more on my studies and things that I always say I have no time to finish. I like to think more about possibilities than dilemmas.

Learning velocity is another issue worth noting. Research by Muir et al. (2019) shows that students learn effectively if they are allowed to learn at their own pace. As revealed in a study by Tsai (2012) on English for specific purposes (ESP) instruction in a Taiwanese university, many students need to slow down when interacting or engaging with learning materials. Silence becomes a beneficial part of learning when students use it to solve problems and develop critical thoughts; when they perform reading, rehearse inner speech, take notes, absorb knowledge, and shape viewpoints to be able to productively respond to tasks. When these actions occur, to take students out of silence would mean interrupting their engagement. 7.7.2

Silence As Social Engagement

Social engagement is often visualised in the form of people working together. However, interaction, which is conventionally defined as involving two or more individuals, can happen within one person. The discourse since the 1990s has documented a phenomenon known as learner self-interaction (Soo & Bonk, 1998; Su et al., 2005). This includes self-talk (Soo & Bonk, 1998), studying academic materials (Moore, 1989), familiarising oneself with technology (Hillman, Willis & Gunawardena, 1994), interacting with a make-believe interlocutor (Shardakova & Pavlenko, 2004), taking on an imaginary identity (Early & Norton, 2012), and vicarious communication (Devries, 1996; Sutton, 2001). Vicariously, students can read someone else’s posts while envisaging that it reflects their voice. They can also treat peer problems as their own and figure

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out ways of resolving them. Such interaction, which contains both cognitive and social meanings, can have the same learning benefit as any multi-party communication. As can be drawn from post-structuralist theory, when language learners use imagination to develop multiple identities, such options help them not only shift perspectives but also make sense of language use. Without this abstract ability, language learning would be extremely poor and narrow as it would restrict all kinds of rich access available in the human world, as learners would fail to stretch their minds beyond their own ethnicity, gender, personality, and existing situations. Individual difference is an important area to consider in social engagement. Learning is inherently governed by individual personalities and favourite styles. Some learners prefer to work with a community rather than working alone due to their need to thrive in the presence of others. Others are perfectly fine with learning in solitude and only join peers when needing variation. Some of the discourse, however, seems to treat all students as having the same need by overvaluing peer interaction as the key to optimal learning for everyone. Although the generalisation that one ‘will perform better when allowed to work collaboratively with others’ (Dixson, 2015, n. p.) seems true for a vast number of learners, it may not be the case for all. Studies by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001), Meyer (2003), and Pawan et al. (2003) discover that the quantity of interaction does not reflect the quality of cognitive engagement. The student who participates most vigorously throughout a course may not necessarily be the most brilliant in the class. In various contexts, I have learned of highly articulate individuals who eventually failed the course for writing substandard essays. In many cases, it is their sociable, friendly disposition (rather than intellectual sophistication) that inclines some students to be constantly involved in low-level cognitive exchange (Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Kanuka & Anderson, 1998). Owing to the above-mentioned differences in learning preferences, the concept of interaction in online education settings can be broadened to embrace the practice of interacting with instructors, interacting with peers, interacting with oneself, and interacting with learning materials, as well as a blend of these varieties. Social engagement is not always about verbalisation. Sometimes, one might choose to refrain from the unnecessary word to maintain charm and harmony. Empirical communication research has documented numerous meaningful moments of silence rather than simply seeing silence as unsociable. Some students deliberately keep quiet in the face of a potential conflict to prevent it from evolving (Conrad, 2002). Others do not wish to stand out in lectures where verbal interruption from students is not the norm, as reported by Zhou (2021) in a project on factors influencing low participation. Many studies have consistently revealed similar factors that shape a positive social learning environment including congruent collaboration (Garcia-Sanchez & Rojas-Lizana, 2012),

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pleasantness (Peck, 2012), and mutual understanding (Zhang et al., 2014). Depending on contexts, these qualities can be nurtured through either speech or silence, or a balance of both. It is absurd to assume that a healthy social climate must be packed with constant talking. Optimal social engagement is often marked by the shared enjoyment of learning content rather than the quantity of speech. That is, members of a class would adore each other’s ability to contribute stimulating ideas to a discussion and make it interesting rather than filling time with spontaneous chat. Suppose it is the maximum amount of talk that improves a social climate the best, then the most talkative person in every class should be the most loved by everyone. Unfortunately, in many classrooms, talkaholic characters are often found to be the least popular. To establish enjoyable and meaningful interaction, discussion content needs to be intelligent, inspiring, provocative, and generating divergent responses. 7.7.3

Silence As Affective Engagement

Over the past decade, there has been a robust movement in SLA research to shift its research focus to positive emotions rather than the negative emotions that seemed to dominate SLA discourse during the 1990s and 2000s (MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012; Black & Allen, 2018; Wang et al., 2021). Scholars have unanimously agreed that it is enjoyment that stimulates sustainment (Dewaele & Dewaele, 2020). Some examples of positive emotions are learner well-being, humour, care, enjoyment, confidence, excitement, happiness, curiosity, kindness, bonding, forgiveness, mutual respect, empathy, gratitude, admiration, optimism, hope, resilience, and mental strength. These areas, which can be captured as ‘loving pedagogy’ (Wang et al., 2021, p. 5) or a ‘pedagogy of love’ (Loreman, 2011, p. 15), have emerged to dilute the prevailing previous discourse filled with anger and sad emotions such as fear, boredom, apprehension, reticence, negative anxiety, low esteem, tension, pressure, stress, misunderstanding, demotivation, dissatisfaction, and frustration. According to Black and Allen (2018), researchers for decades have dwelled excessively on anxiety and other undesirable feelings but have not adequately addressed how nuances of positive emotions can transform learning. Positive emotions, which boost inspiration for creativity (Fredrickson, 2001), might happen in silence rather than in participation. Although it is widely believed that verbal participation will translate into student-centred learning and successful academic performance (Karayan & Crowe, 1997; Smith & Hardaker, 2000; Davies & Graff, 2005), an in-depth case study by Pittaway and Moss (2019) of a student in an Australian university reveals a different insight. The participant under investigation, though remaining invisible during most learning events, demonstrates a high level of engagement

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and progress. Such studies raise awareness that verbal interaction is not necessarily the essence of learner-centredness. Instead, learner-centred education needs to reflect the diverse needs of individuals (Pillay, 2002) and allow choices rather than demanding that everyone behaves in the same verbal way. Although many educators assume that verbal participation and learning engagement are related, this is not always true. While many studies indicate that the former often leads to the latter (Picciano, 2002), others are cautious with such relationships as they realise that those who participate frequently may not engage well, and those who engage deeply may not participate much. Research by Davies and Graff (2005), for example, on 122 university students in the UK discovers that students who actively participate during online discussions are not those who achieve the highest outcome in their study. Another study by Weisskirch and Milburn (2003) of 3,125 online posting incidents concludes that a high number of posts from students does not reflect the quality of their learning. The same study learns that, when posting is made compulsory for grades, it is the number of posts that increases rather than the critical engagement. However, when forum participation remains optional, silence pervades but those who voluntarily post their ideas often demonstrate deep thinking, interesting inquiries, and overall highquality contributions. This finding shows that effective learning engagement might happen as internal, quiet work rather than as external, outgoing participation. As empirical research demonstrates, it is autonomous motivation that generates more learning efficiency than controlled motivation (Cai & Liem, 2017). 7.7.4

Silence As Digital Learning Engagement

Engagement with technology in an educational setting means more than just the use of computers and digital tools. Instead, it is how academic skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and communicative ability are adapted to function effectively in the virtual space. Since the mastery of technology alone would not be sufficient for optimal learning outcomes and experience, the concept of such engagement must not be confined to ‘digital skills’ but needs to be seen as ‘digital learning skills’. This understanding explains why many digital natives (i.e. those who grew up with computers and learn ICT tools fast) find themselves struggling in online learning contexts simply because they suffer from inadequate learning skills. For example, using technology to socialise requires more socialising skills than technological skills. Using technology to retrieve materials and study them requires more reading skills than retrieving skills. No matter how one masters all technological gears, it is eventually the human mind that controls all kinds of actions. Although the learning space is digital, the human brain is not. After technology allows entry into the online setting, students then need to use all their conventional skills to perform online

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tasks such as accessing materials, listening to lecturer recordings, watching videos, studying PowerPoint presentations, interacting with resources, taking notes, visiting library databases, constructing a debate, formulating a research topic, collecting articles for an essay, analysing writing samples, reading forum postings, learning from feedback, improving performance, responding to task requirements, preparing for a group project, resolving confusion, and so on. These processes require a great deal of information processing and thought incubating rather than visible and speedy participation. Such silence seems perfectly fine when students are aware of what they are doing and why. Many studies discover that learners who receive timely support and who have prior online learning experiences tend to have more confidence and perform better than those without these conditions (Wang, Shannon & Ross, 2013; Alshaikhi & Madini, 2016). One way to assist learning is the integration of self-study centres whereby students can build their individualised resources (Smith & Craig, 2013). With self-selected materials, students can engage in group discussions (Kenny, 2008) and collaborative construction of knowledge (Wu, 2016). In a word, helpful silence is born out of the selfefficacy of those who do not rely on others but take the initiative to orient themselves, explore possibilities, and take responsibility for their progress. While all students are encouraged to communicate, some might not find peer interaction essential for their learning success. Instead, they feel comfortable with vicarious participation and treat their study as a self-governing process. By and large, engagement is about the ability to act, feel, and think (Frederick, Blumenfeld & Paris, 2004; Yang, Lavonen & Niemi, 2018), all of which can be either collaborative or autonomous. Historically, self-directed learning has been an important research theme in education since the 1960s with the early research works of Houle (1961), Tough (1967), and Knowles (1975) demonstrating that efficient learning can happen with or without the help of others. While highly verbal students enjoy competing with peers, introverted students compete with themselves. Arguably, those who opt for quiet learning are just differently engaged. 7.8

Concluding Insights

Computer-mediated communication is inherently susceptible to manipulation and misunderstanding in general, let alone online silence. This is because, when entering a virtual learning space, many students no longer represent themselves as who they are in real life (Wilson & Peterson, 2002). Online education has characteristics that generate specific needs and scenarios whereby communication is vulnerable to disruption. Besides learner need for mental processing time, silence results from reluctance to communicate, lack of inspiration, conformity to a low-communication climate, resistance towards

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humdrum learning content, poor pedagogical management, student distraction, occasional loss of interest, unestablished norms of online behaviour, lack of explicit participation rules, decrease of teacher approachability, and needing more observation than interaction. To effectively monitor and engage students in online education, every education programme must offer a framework for identifying the evidence of learning progress. Dooly (2011) and Rea-Dickins (2006, 2007) suggest looking at small achievements such as learner abilities to extend a concept, to relate knowledge to one’s own experience, and to use skills in different contexts. Arguably, such complex practices would involve some degree of thought processing in silent time, considering that hasty, spontaneous discussion may not easily yield quality ideas. To pursue this point, one might say that silence is helpful if its outcome can be reported or shared, either in speaking or writing. Without following up on the outcome of such moments, teachers will not be able to tell if learner quietness means ‘task in progress’ or ‘off-task behaviour’. Silence is mysterious because the same occurrence can denote whether something is happening or nothing happens. For a desirable effect, therefore, learner silence might need to be guided and followed up on rather than being completely left to chance. Online silence is not all wrong and online participation is not always right. Online learning offers flexible time and conditions for productive silence to take place as long as this process is well managed. By providing forum space and time for using it, learners are allowed to prepare for participation, which traditional classrooms seem less capable of. In this way, the online environment fosters learner reflection, advanced cognition, and information processing (Smith, 2001; Westberry, 2009). In most cases, low-level thinking would lead to low-level participation. If students are not given the conditions to process learning content in profound ways, they will not be able to produce anything deep to share as meaningful participation. In the end, it is the quality of students’ thoughts, rather than constantly talking and posting, that fosters the essence of a worthwhile learning journey.

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Coping with Undesirable Online Silence

8.1

The Challenging Nature of Online Learning

Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist, once wrote: ‘While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation’ (Debord, 1967/2014, p. 90). Although this observation was made long before the digital age, it seems to clearly reflect two conflicting perspectives on today’s technological context. Digital education has been viewed from both a macro perspective and a micro perspective. Scholars who take the former standpoint conceptualise the field as an exciting movement with massive positive changes sweeping across the globe. These changes include, for example, increased mobility through knowledge exchange (Fan et al., 2018), instruction beyond international borders (Rajagopal et al., 2020), enhanced learning collaboration (Ciges, 2001), and new forms of communication that transform lives (Bonk et al., 2015). In a broad sense, twenty-firstcentury educational progress is celebrated with the optimism that the whole world is moving forward together as one. From a micro perspective, however, the above revolution does not reach everyone equally. Every day, there are students around the world who suffer from not owning a computer, having poor access to the Internet, struggling to cultivate online autonomy, and being unable to find the optimal route to e-learning as their ways are not understood. Somehow, the advanced spirit of digital education does not embrace those who cannot afford the cost of technology and those with complex individual styles. Silence is one of those nuanced concerns, as opposed to widespread public concerns, that seems difficult to notice if one is more interested in the global picture of achievements. To cite a case in point, research by Ezra et al. (2021) on the experiences of 154 university students in Israel captures the desperate voices of many online students who are crying out for help (pp. 8–9): ‘I feel there has been a drop in learning quality ever since we moved to online learning.’ ‘The learning is boring. The teachers mostly read from their presentation.’ ‘I’m sick of this and every day it’s the same situation and I don’t feel like learning anymore . . . ’ ‘I miss seeing my friends.’ 129

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A contradiction exists between what some scholars fervently visualise and what many learners genuinely experience. While, in ideology, online education represents a new space for students to claim the right to speak (Moje & Luke, 2009; Janks, 2010) and to share texts with greater ease (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010), empirical evidence keeps revealing students’ isolation and distress (Hara & Kling, 2001) as well as teachers suffering from the lack of learning response to ineffective online pedagogy (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2007; Lestari, Akbarjono & Martina, 2021). Besides, there emerges another contradiction between teacher and learner perceptions of the online experience. For example, research studies by del Rosal, Ware, and Montgomery (2018) and del Rosal, Conry, and Wu (2017) recognise teacher success in catering to learner needs, building strong connections, knowing students as individuals, and helping them improve English proficiency. In the meantime, studies by Strayer (2007) and Egbert, Herman, and Chang (2018) report a reverse picture of student frustration with limited class time, poor language practice, and unhelpful teaching. A third contradiction occurs between researchers who discover that online programmes enhance communication and other researchers who reveal that online learning diminishes communication. While many studies demonstrate that e-learning makes interaction livelier and more effective than that in traditional classrooms (Rosenbaum, 2001; Mangan, 2001; Smith, 2001; Lee & Pyo, 2003; McCombs & Vakili, 2005; George-Palilonis & Filak, 2009), others find that e-learning constrains interaction, downplays social values, and lessens interpersonal bonding (Fryer & Bovee, 2016; Ginaya, Rejeki & Astuti, 2018; Andayana, 2020; Kanca, Ginaya & Astuti, 2021). Taken together, all the discrepancies in empirical outcomes expose the reality that the efficacy of online programmes varies tremendously, ranging from success to despair depending on situational and individual factors in every context. To address learner silence due to ineffective learning, this chapter offers a set of recommendations drawn from research evidence. The twofold aim of this discussion is to help students transform negative silence into either positive silence or participation. Silence is undesirable when it occurs purposelessly without thought processing and idea production (unless idle silence plays a refreshing role so that students can come back to learning with new energy). This happens when students listen for information but make no effort to form questions, develop viewpoints, respond to issues, or find solutions to problems. Some students join their course of study only to receive enough knowledge to not feel lost but do not plan on contributing to the learning of others. They keep a low profile and perform just enough to pass the course and earn their degree. Motivating these students can be a daunting task but it is worth trying rather than giving up on them. Arguably, if the counter-silence measures seem positive and enjoyable, passive students may become more responsive in the learning process.

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8.2 Ways of Coping with Painful Silence

8.2

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To minimise negative silence requires replacing it with either productive silence or participation. Productive silence includes activities such as preparation for contribution, vicarious learning, reflection, and mental engagement (see, for example, Romiszowski & Mason, 2004). Participation includes activities such as gathering resources (Davies & Graff, 2005), reading academic works (Lipponen et al., 2003), sharing thoughts on discussion forums (Davidson-Shivers, Muilenburg & Tanner, 2001), engaging in academic dialogue, and responding to peer postings (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003). The rest of this chapter shares a set of ten research-founded strategies, namely: • making learning content interesting and useful • personalised communication • clear participation protocols • mediation of student workload and participation • scaffolding online learning • organising choices • varying approaches to tasks • encouraging students to find their voice • collaboration with non-teaching staff • teacher presence with a social meaning The strategies above are developed from three main sources: suggestions from students, methods experimented with by researchers, and my observation of innovative online teaching practice. Below is an explanation of how each strategy can be deployed to take students out of resistant silence and move them towards productive learning. 8.2.1

Making Learning Content Interesting and Useful

For over seventy years now, ever since the 1950s when television became commercially available, people have watched television programmes for amusement, through which many have also acquired language proficiency without the help of a teacher. If we take the first screening of a commercial movie in 1895 into account, humans have been familiar with the on-screen mode of entertainment and education for nearly 130 years. From a learning perspective, television and film have offered precious conditions for linguistic and cultural exposure including diverse text types, authentic contents, frequent exposure to the target language, voluntary selection of resources, and individualised enjoyment of different tastes. Our modern-day online schooling, unfortunately, may not offer such features. In many e-learning programmes, text types and contents seem more pedagogical than authentic, exposure to L2 input remains low, learner choice is constrained, and enjoyment is hardly

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a distinctive strength of digital pedagogy. For these reasons, electronic language learning seems tedious and if the teacher does not know how to make content and methods more attractive, students are likely to switch off. Vonderwell and Zachariah (2005) through research learn that to inspire learner participation teachers must organise for learning content to be amusing. One way to bring enjoyment is by focusing on quality rather than quantity. Some lecturers provide students with extensive theoretical content without allowing them time and space to digest it through reading engagement, reflection, applying, and preparing for in-depth discussions. Empirical evidence supports the relationship between the quantity of input and receptivity: if the former is excessive, the latter will drop. A study by Sharp et al. (2019) on university student perception of academic content shows that, when course materials seem cumbersome, students not only panic but also withdraw from participation. Another project by Zhou (2021) on students’ silent experiences also reveals that those who are subject to overloading content easily lose learning interest. One typical example of uninspiring transmission of knowledge would be the use of PowerPoint slides with masses of text to be read out loud by the teacher. Many students find this delivery approach pointless as it neglects both cognitive processing and emotional engagement. Among ways of remedying such boredom are the use of functional visuals to represent words, colourful words for emphasis, long sentences being replaced by keywords, theory connected to practice, teacher sharing of personal anecdotes, humour, thinking space, as well as experiential and personalised learning. All these require imagination, creativity, passion for new ideas, and the avoidance of routine, boring tasks. Along this line, a survey conducted by North and Pillay (2002) on English teachers in a secondary school setting reports the common practice of giving students the same task repeatedly out of habit rather than usefulness. There was a time when people in some countries, such as Japan and Korea, were concerned that someday language instruction robots might replace English teachers. This scenario, however, does not need to happen at all, simply because some teachers have already acted like robots in their work. 8.2.2

Personalised Communication

Efforts to initiate bonding with students can be made at an early stage when administrative staff begin to communicate with students to bring them into a study programme (Betts, 2009). The teacher can make a welcome video to establish a sense of community. I know a lecturer who, being also a musician, created a song and performed it in the first video of a course to boost learning morale and make a personal connection. After watching it, students looked forward to meeting this interesting teacher and being inspired further. Another lecturer introduced her lesson recording by dancing to the soundtrack of rock music, not

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hesitating to ‘embarrass’ herself for a more humanistic style of inspiration. In another incident, two colleagues paired up and improvised a series of video recordings in which their dialogue involved humour and anecdotal examples for every weekly topic. Students find these pedagogical varieties refreshing and memorable as they confront routine and breathe new energy into e-learning. Throughout a course of study, communication every week is essential to maintain a helpful learning culture. Such communication involves, for example, answering students’ online questions, summarising and commenting on weekly posts, acknowledging student effort and progress, offering additional resources in response to arising interests, providing feedback, organising reading groups, and so on. Betts (2011) recognises a logical relationship between teacher care and student engagement in online settings. That is, the more support students receive, the more willing they are to contribute to the learning process. Without such a connection, the online climate would be filled with unproductive silence. Even after graduation, staying in touch with alumni is a way of showing care and keeping track of how effective education has been in assisting students’ career paths. 8.2.3

Clear Participation Protocols

Participation protocols refer to a well-articulated task procedure that guides students through contribution. This would include a clearly stated topic or set of questions, the aim of contribution (e.g. for grades or shared perspectives), requirements or expectations (e.g. an opinion, an experience, a critical comment), rules for interaction (e.g. exchanging individual voices, reporting the outcome of group discussion), the size of contribution (e.g. time duration or word count), a deadline, stages of development (e.g. work in progress, summary of output), and a follow-up plan (e.g. peer response, teacher feedback). In a literature review, Hew, Cheung, and Ng (2010) highlight the fact that students may not contribute when they feel uncertain about the requirement and method of participation. A study by Zydney, deNoyelles, and Seo (2012) of online graduate students in the United States also learns that, compared with discussion events without clear expectations, protocol-based tasks significantly increase student engagement. Protocols also entail the management of online courses to ensure that every course is explicitly mapped out and logically sequenced, with clarity about student workload and responsibility. In practice, if the teacher seems too busy to respond to postings, it would be helpful to let the class know how often to expect feedback. Empirical research shows that the depth of communication at both task and course levels exerts a bearing on students’ learning success (Durrington & Yu, 2004; Keller, 2013; Picciano, 2002). Along this line, teachers need to make conscious efforts to involve less engaged students and

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respond to their learning problem when it arises. To make this possible, on the learning website there needs to be a suggestion box for students to express their needs, share problems, and raise questions when their study requires individualised support. 8.2.4

Mediation of Student Workload and Participation

Research by Duran (2020) reveals the necessity for teachers to mediate the learning process by making it manageable for all students. Along this line, the negotiation between workload and participation is important to consider. Some inexperienced teachers tend to expect too much from students in both quantity and quality of their contributions, not realising that when the former is too ambitious, the latter will decrease. According to cognitive load theory, there is a need to distinguish between information overload and cognitive overload (see, for example, Paas & van Merrienboer, 1994). While students can cope with the former by selecting what they wish to learn the most, it is the latter that can damage their learning system if students are forced to contribute past the load that their brain can process. Once the quantity of study is reasonable, learner participation can be further facilitated by giving frequent responses to students’ posts. Many students feel that their voice is unheard or even silenced when their writing seems to fall into oblivion. To remedy this, teachers need to make comments on student contribution content and organise for peers to provide feedback to each other. It would also be helpful if the teacher provided a summary of the discussion thread after it has evolved to a meaningful extent, to bring students’ ideas together in some connection (Feenberg, 1989). 8.2.5

Scaffolding Online Learning

Unlike scaffolding in a conventional classroom where teacher support is mainly academic work, scaffolding in a virtual setting requires academic, administrative, and technical assistance to ease learning challenges. Scaffolding improves student life as it helps elevate standards, communicate expectations (Krause, 2005; Dunn & Rakes, 2011), and facilitate student agency (Pittaway and Moss, 2019). Students also need help to develop original ideas without which they would not be able to participate. The relevant discourse has acknowledged student familiarity with learning content as an easier way to become verbally open (Hew et al., 2010; Tu & McIsaac, 2010). Duran’s (2020) study, for example, reveals that a combination of a positive social rapport and an interesting topic can help students connect easily and can make online discussions feel like real-world conversations. Besides verbal participation, it is also important to guide students to employ silence for learning. Many scholars have agreed that silence is an opportunity for

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thoughtful reflection and absorption of learning content (Freire, 2003; Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2007). When students are given reasonable time and clear instructions, they will feel comfortable exercising productive silence. 8.2.6

Shared Responsibilities and Distributed Roles

Students in small groups can be given a problem to solve together and prepare to report their collective solution to the rest of the class. When a group leader is assigned to report the outcome, participation is bound to happen. Research by Zhou (2021) on student experience also indicates that reticence often results from a lack of rehearsal or preparation. In addition to this, the teacher can allocate leadership roles to class members. In every break-out room, learners take turns at leading the conversation and verbally reporting its outcome to the rest of the class. Such peer-facilitated dialogues allow a stress-free atmosphere for genuine exchanges of ideas. A study by Rourke and Anderson (2002) on Canadian university students’ experience with peer-led online discussion groups shows that this model is favourably received by students for being wellstructured, mutually responsive, and enjoyable. 8.2.7

Organising Choices

Allowing students to select their favourite modes of contribution is another useful strategy to adopt. For example, a balance must be created between taskoriented activities and self-generated topics, also known as controlled and free debates. The former refers to teacher-led activity such as a question or an issue raised by the teacher to start a forum thread. The latter means students select issues of personal interest from course readings, from which a thread is initiated by students. While some students are contented with teacher management and guidance in course requirements, others only find satisfaction in autonomy and in connecting lesson content with their thinking. The second type of student needs a different kind of support from the teacher, which goes beyond management and more into inspiration. In a study by Xie, Debacker, and Ferguson (2006) on university students’ online experience in the United States, students who commenced a discussion idea without being responded to ended up thinking that their views were not valued and became discouraged from posting further. Without the freedom to explore issues that concerned them, these students easily lost interest in participation. Drawn from this understanding, online teaching based merely on administrative control rather than intellectual stimulation may help the learning of some but damage the learning of others. Choices of technology are also important in online education. Students can be allowed to select their favourite digital tools. For example, in my observation, when it comes to sharing a group document, some students feel

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comfortable with accessing it on the Moodle space, others want the document emailed to them, while some prefer to use Google Docs. It might be helpful to consider what works best for everyone rather than holding on to what the teacher feels most familiar with. Sometimes, when students voice different preferences, the same documents can be shared at multiple locations, or the class may vote for the best location and method to edit a document. Another example would be the choice of tools for group presentations, which can be PowerPoint, Prezi, Keynote, Slides, Slidebean, Zoho Show, Google Slides, Canva, and Visme, or beyond these templates, such as video recordings and poster expositions. Research by Quinton (2010), Dahlstrom et al. (2011), and Burton et al. (2015) reveals that students are involved in a task more effectively when they can rely on tools that suit their tastes. 8.2.8

Variety of Approaches to Tasks

Discussion methods can be varied to cater to different learning styles. This is made possible through diverse grouping, locations, durations, challenges, topic contents, formats, and leaders. The overuse of any single method of discussion might favour some students and discourage others. For example, it is observed that brainstorming, while supporting a democratic climate of idea sharing, may marginalise learners with a reflective style who often prefer in-depth scrutiny of issues that require more thinking time than spontaneous contribution. Some scholars find brainstorming demotivating to highly introverted and creative students (see, for example, Smith, 1995; Hermasari, 2018). This is because this strategy tends to yield a superficial collection of themes without much analysis. To improve the situation, the teacher might like to create a follow-up task that arranges for every small group to unpack a theme of their own choice. Another task type, as recommended by Takagi (2013), is brain writing, that is, brainstorming ideas in written form. Working at their own pace, learners not only develop themes but can also unpack them with more content or arguments. 8.2.9

Encouraging Students to Find Their Voice

Student voice can be spontaneous or prepared before class time. Sometimes, instructors must withdraw from their teaching role and authority altogether and invite every student to plan a three-minute presentation of their views on selected issues. The ideology of learners as co-creators of knowledge, which has been increasingly promoted in education (Bates, 2004; Rovai, 2004), needs to be experienced in an online learning environment as much as in the physical classroom. To enhance the quality of shared ideas and to ensure learning commitment, contributions can be organised through individual consultation with the teacher. It is also essential that the teacher keeps track of student

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contributions to provide a summary and comments on them. When students’ ideas are fully acknowledged and become part of the lesson, the experience not only becomes more pleasant and meaningful but also allows momentum for more interaction in future lessons. 8.2.10

Collaboration with Non-Teaching Staff

Involving students’ proactive online learning should not be the sole responsibility of teachers. In an ideal online and blended programme, the role of support staff and online learning design should be seen as equally essential to that of the teacher (see, for example, Middlecamp, 2005; ACER, 2011). At Monash University, where I work, ICT support staff also conduct research, as they are not only administrators. Every semester, online designers find ways to present materials in more attractive and user-friendly ways. They hold meetings with lecturers to hear suggestions before the updated looks are launched and gather end-of-semester feedback from lecturers again, to see what else can be improved. One example of such research outcomes includes being allowed to personalise the online learning space by creating customised icons, choosing a favourite background colour, and selecting any template from options provided by the ICT team. There is a continuous dialogue between lecturers and technicians in making student learning easier. 8.2.11

Teacher Presence with a Social Meaning

Some teachers do not seem to be concerned with the social dimension of student learning. In one incident, I overheard a lecturer informing the class, accentuating every word: ‘Do not bother me on the weekend with email inquiries.’ Although not being available during holidays is understandable, drawing a resolute boundary to keep students away might turn the teacher into an unsympathetic character who exerts a negative impact on students’ learning inspiration. As I later learned at student events, some internalise a mental wall between them and their lecturer, viewing the latter as a functional authority rather than a social human being. Although the purpose of the rule was to keep some of their time free for other work commitments, this could to lead to such lecturers having no relationship with their students beyond an instrumental one. One student shared: ‘I cannot connect with my teachers, who are always too busy with other things.’ Another explained: ‘I’m basically teaching myself. There is not much opportunity for lecturers to answer my burning questions.’ The teacher’s role is far more than just helping students to acquire course content and must also include social management. The Internet is a doubleedged sword: it can either bring people closer together or can separate them into loners. Every teacher has the power to help students make the former their

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choice. Scholars have unanimously agreed that social presence is an important precondition for cognitive presence (Stacey, 1999; Rourke et al., 2001; Swan, 2003; Garrison & Anderson, 2003). Good teaching entails instilling in students the love for learning so that everyone feels that they are being a valuable part of a humanistic learning community. The discourse has acknowledged social engagement as being central to students’ academic success (Price & Tovar, 2014). Building a social environment is not just about having students talk to each other during the lesson, but involvement might need to go the extra mile. For example, at Monash University, my colleagues and I sometimes organise additional meetings with students who share an interest in a similar research topic or a discussion issue, which could be within the course or even beyond it and into a future career pathway. We build an optional dialogue, not only to show care but also as a way of staying in touch both within and beyond the course. Students enjoy this process as they feel that they are not simply learning from the course content but also from real life in a climate of social trust and individualised mentoring. 8.3

Concluding Insights

A significant body of research reveals a cause-and-effect relationship between teacher silence and learner silence. Teacher silence in digital contexts refers to the lack of presence, devotion, and support that makes the teacher seem to disappear from online management and communication. Studies by Akyol and Garrison (2008); Shea and Bidjerano (2009); Garrison and Cleveland-Innes (2005); and Garrison, Cleveland-Innes, and Fung (2010) show that students who perceive instructors’ lack of involvement reduce their learning efforts dramatically. Sometimes a teacher who may be by nature a highly articulate person might create the impression of absence when they fail to respond to students’ evolving needs. Some examples of teacher silence include not making students feel welcome at the beginning of a course, not showing enthusiasm throughout the course, not answering student questions promptly, not providing helpful feedback to assignment tasks, not keeping track of student progress, not supporting students adequately when they are lost, performing a teaching role without much of a social role, criticising more than praising students’ work, sending reminders and warnings more than expressing love and care, responding superficially to student postings, acting out that they are too busy or tired, and (this is the worst on the list) indicating that students must not bother them. Behaving in any of these ways would amount to pushing students away. When a teacher fails to be a lovely, helpful mentor in the eyes of students, that teacher disappears in their thinking and reaction. Consequently, students resort to silence as a form of resistance to the invisible teacher.

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Like face-to-face silence, online silence is culture-bound. Learners from cultures where silence is an integral part of everyday communication might continue to respect silence in a virtual environment as a tool for deep thinking, attentive listening, reflection, respect, and harmony. In the meanwhile, those from a culture where silence does not have a great significance but words tend to dominate in showing connection and enthusiasm might wish to maintain more verbal connection with the class. It is observed that teachers with extended experience with virtual classrooms tend to tolerate and manage silence more efficiently than those who are relatively new in this area. The less familiar they are with online education strategies, the more they connect silence with negative connotations (Plank, 1994). To navigate digital teaching and learning well already requires a specific set of pedagogical skills such as knowing students as individuals, establishing rules of communication, and following up on student work. To a great extent, teacher imagination and diverse strategies play an essential role in responding to learning challenges among students who suffer from not communicating as comfortably as they would in a traditional classroom.

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Silence in ELT Task Design

9.1

Why Silence in Tasks

Research on classroom experiences has documented cases of frustration when learners struggle to process thoughts through the talk of others and during too many whole-class discussions. In a study by Moran (2016), many students recalled their best learning experiences as incidents of quiet concentration on inspiring content without interruptions. The students feel that when they engaged intellectually, peer speech would disrupt the flow of ideas. According to Helgoe (2013), the need to cope with challenging knowledge by interacting with oneself is essential to learning efficiency. However, it is formal instruction that sometimes inconveniences the practice of the inner voice for learning (Tomlinson, 2001a). Very often, when silence emerges during a lesson, the inexperienced teacher will hurry to end it or mobilise the class to fill that space with words. Arguably, in every educational setting, there may be activities that characteristically involve cognitive strategies. To not treat silence as a planned component in task construction is failing to comprehend how tasks work. 9.2

The Unexplored Relationship between Task Design and Silence

The concept of ‘task’ in this chapter refers to any type of learning activity. Empirical research into the dynamic of how learner silence interacts with task design hardly exists to this day. In the literature on SLA, it is talk, not silence, that receives recognition as output. However, to assume that output must always be audible represents a constricted way of understanding how learning progresses. Depending on how silence is employed, the occurrence of inner speech in the learner’s system deserves to be viewed as a type of production, especially when thoughts are taking shape in the mind. According to Innocenti (2002, p. 62), the words that form our inner speech, before being spoken out loud, exist as auditory or visual information in our consciousness. Sokolov (1972, p. 65) stresses that ‘external speech is functionally dependent on inner speech’. Ridgway (2009, p. 49) also observes that ‘thinking in a language 140

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9.2 The Relationship between Task Design and Silence

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provides practice which is arguably as good as speaking it. Processes as important as automaticity continue to operate and one’s proficiency continues to develop.’ Such incubation of ideas is common among students. Research has provided evidence that many students practise spontaneously speaking to themselves for years without realising that they have such skills and habits (Guerrero, 1991; Tomlinson, 2001a). These observations and insights suggest that learners’ mental processes do produce output that needs more understanding, recognition, and nurturing. In a word, how the proactive mind copes with the everyday classroom task has yet to be fully understood. A study by Carless (2004) reports a thought-provoking incident when primary school students resisted talk for a good reason and decided to work in silence. During a lesson, the teacher gave students a survey form and asked them to verbally exchange information about how their friends travelled to school every day. Since most students in that class went to school on foot and this reality was already known to everyone, many did not find any use in talking. Instead, they quietly wrote down the answer on the survey sheet. Silence in this case was authentically employed as it would have been absurd to ask for already-known information. This anecdote demonstrates that task developers must consider when learners need to speak and when they do not. In many cases, it is the purpose of a task that decides the responding mode. Such dynamics deserve more research effort since to this day the field of silence studies does not have adequate knowledge in this area. Historically, many theories relating to task design since the 1970s have largely favoured the promotion of verbalism. They include, for example, interaction hypothesis (Hatch, 1978; Pica, 1994; Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1996; Gass, 2013), peer-interactive tasks (Ohta, 2001), and teacherlearner communication (Hall & Walsh, 2002), which describe the success of task performance by highlighting the initiation of speech, guidance for speech, and ways of responding to speech with more speech. Other theories look at learners’ expressive intention (Buchanan & Margolin, 1995), the role of input (Krashen, 1976, 1977), comprehensible output and appropriacy (Swain, 1985) and the value of linguistic noticing (Schmidt, 1995, 2001), which again highlight the exposure that accelerates verbal output. In other words, speech has been consistently emphasised as the essence of fluency. The above view, however, disregards the reality that fluency is not only a social product but also a mental process. People speak fluently because they think fluently. To not practise thinking properly would damage speaking. Through empirical efforts over the past two decades, many scholars have redefined verbal fluency by looking beyond the audible word to embrace the internal progression that builds communication proficiency. Research into cognition and behaviour shows that cognition and utterance are more related than we think (De Jong et al., 2012). While cognitive processes support the

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quality of utterances, experience in making utterances also consolidates cognitive abilities. Along this line, longitudinal research conducted among speakers by Riazantseva (2001), Derwing et al. (2009), and De Jong et al. (2012) and phenomenological research by Bao (2014, 2020a) has traced utterances back to thought processes. These studies are inspired by the discipline of social psychology where the combination of cognition and behaviour naturally forms speech in a social context. They provide the groundwork for L2 fluency to be viewed as ‘the operation of a dynamical system’ (Segalowitz, 2016, p. 20) rather than a collection of skills. Drawn from the understanding of what happens in the real-world formulation of speech, scholars assert that fluency comprises three distinct components, namely cognitive fluency, utterance fluency, and perceived fluency (Segalowitz, 2010, 2016), with the first component, which takes place in the mind, deciding the quality of the second component and the impact of the third one. Cognitive fluency is how effectively one can mobilise individual knowledge and skills to construct output (Unkelbach, 2006; Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2021). Utterance fluency denotes the flow and speed of oral delivery (Skehan, 2003; Tavakoli & Skehan, 2005) as well as accuracy and lexical diversity (Kormos & Denes, 2004). Perceived fluency is the listener’s impression of how well the speaker verbally communicates (Segalowitz, 2010). These three stages form a procedure of speech planning, speech production, and intended impact. This socio-cognitive view on fluency is worth considering in materials development because it attends to the root of fluency (i.e. the baking of ideas), rather than its surface (i.e. a set of competencies). If such a dynamic is ignored, learners will be left alone to cope with tasks by themselves while the teacher, without helping, only waits to hear the output. To avoid this dilemma, what task designers should do is breaking every challenging task down into steps and scaffold learners through a route that builds fluency. Some theories related to psycholinguistic processes (Nunan, 2004), such as the cognitive interactionist model (Kim, 2017) and the sociocultural interactionist approach with an emphasis on mental functioning (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014), have looked beyond the interaction hypothesis by implying that it is learners’ reasoning need that influences how tasks are performed. However, in cognitive interactionist theorists’ awareness of how the nature of a task can decide the degree of interaction, the emphasis is often on social context and learner behaviour (interpersonal response) rather than on the nature of every task and how the mind copes with it (intrapersonal response). Although the discourse in education acknowledges the role of self-selected silence in learning (Zembylas & Michaelides, 2004; Creelman, 2017), hardly any effort has been made to connect this understanding with materials development within ELT and in education in general.

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9.3 A Journey to Explore Silence in Tasks

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Understanding silence in connection to task types is important because, as Stickler et al. (2007) see it, task design has a strong influence on both verbal performance and silent performance. It has been argued that the impact of a task can be altered by facilitating or constraining factors in the classroom situation (Messick, 1989). For instance, allowing time for rehearsal is a supporting factor that would pave the way for more open discussion (Yashima et al., 2016). Inspired by this understanding, my inquiry is: when do students need to speak and when do they keep silent for learning? In what way does task construction influence these processes? When a coursebook writer develops a task, do they consider how much silence is needed for it? If so, what is the evidence for that consideration? The rest of the chapter will offer some research-based answers to these questions. 9.3

A Journey to Explore Silence in Tasks

This discussion reports a sequence of my research attempts to comprehend the mystery of how silence emerges under the influence of task construction regardless of whether task designers and teachers are aware of this phenomenon or not. In doing this, I was hoping to build some systematic knowledge of how learners cope with classroom activities through necessary silence, which might helpfully lead to verbal participation towards the end of the silent moment. My overarching research question (which will be broken down later) is: What is it in language tasks that evokes silence that we must know? If we are unable to recognise the foundation of useful silence in tasks, we will be incapable of accepting silence in student learning. For an overview before going into detail, the inquiry covered these five stages (or five studies): Stage 1: Identifying Task Types I examined seven English coursebooks, both local and global, to identify a wide range of task types. Each was then given a name for identification. All the task types found would be put into a list with a description of what each type means, with examples for illustration. The purpose of building this inventory is to give it to learners for responding by explaining how they would perform each task. Stage 2: A Qualitative Case Study of Learner Response to Tasks A case study was conducted in Australia. Ten international university students were provided with the task types mentioned above for reflection on them and for narrating how they would perform each task. Through face-to-face in-depth interviews, participants would narrate when they needed time for thinking, when they could speak, and why they made such decisions.

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Stage 3: A Quantitative Case Study of Learner Response to Tasks This was a replication of Stage 2 but this time it became a larger-scale case of 260 university students in Indonesia and the Philippines. The participants were provided with the task types above and, through a questionnaire, described how they would perform each. The purpose of this was to see how the two groups of learners would respond differently to the same tasks. The responsive patterns found in Stages 2 and 3 were then compared to see if there were variations. The reason for the replication was to ensure research credibility. Stage 4: Cross-Case Analysis Data from the two studies above were compared to see if patterns of learner responses to tasks varied across the two contexts and why. In my hypothesis, if the responses from two groups of participants diverged too much from each other, that is, being mutually very different, then the relationship between task types and silence would not mean much. In this case, the findings from both projects would collapse as no patterns could be identified and that would mean every learner had responded to each task in their peculiar way. The design of every task would then have nothing to do with silence or talk. However, if the same task evoked the same predominant silence or the same task elicited quick speech from both groups, there would be emerging patterns to reveal a rational relationship between task types and learner responses. Stage 5: Evaluating the Distribution of Task Types in a Coursebook This stage proceeded based on the outcome of Stage 4, which revealed some patterns between task design and learner performance. The project, which examined the distribution of task types across six different levels of a popular global coursebook titled English File, had two objectives: • To see how common the identified task types are. If one identified task type seemed too rare in a global textbook, findings about that type would not mean much as learners would be unlikely to encounter it in their everyday learning. • To find out if the coursebook contains more tasks that stimulate silence or speech. If most tasks in the book support spontaneous speech, they would not have much cognitive value. On the contrary, if the book offered predominantly cognitively demanding work, learners would suffer from heavy processing of content alongside linguistic input. The investigation aimed to discover if the material offers balanced support for learner needs in both thinking and talking. In the discussion that follows, all the five stages of the study will be presented in detail.

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9.4 Identifying Task Types in ELT Course Materials

9.4

145

Study 1: Identifying Task Types in ELT Course Materials

The research journey began by examining tasks in seven coursebook titles: Communication Strategies (Paul, 2008), Speak Now (Richards & Bohlke, 2012), Family and Friends (Thompson, 2014), Empower (Doff et al., 2016), Solutions (Falla & Davies, 2018), English [for Vietnamese] (MOET, 2019), and English File (Latham-Koenig, Oxenden & Lambert, 2019). The choice of these coursebooks rested on randomisation to hopefully cover a broad variety of data. The project aimed to identify as many kinds of task designs as possible and put them in groups based on their characteristics. After looking through over 300 English language tasks with the help of an assistant team, the study managed to catalogue them into twelve common task types as presented below (Table 9.1). The categorisation, however, could be slightly idiosyncratic rather than entirely objective, simply because sometimes a task might be highly complex and happen to belong to more than one category. After the above table was constructed, copies of it were given to 270 students from 6 different countries to study and respond to, with guidance. These participants fell into two case studies: a qualitative case involving 10 students from 4 countries (China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia) and a quantitative case involving 260 students from 2 countries (Indonesia and the Philippines). Since I was living in Australia and Asia-Pacific at the time of research, the participant recruitment process would be convenient due to networking in these regions, which is why I did not select participants from other continents. Although the research focus was the same in both studies, data collection tools catered to the different numbers of participants in the two groups. While in-depth interviews were conducted in the qualitative case, a questionnaire survey was conducted in the qualitative case. The reason for replicating the study was, again, to ensure credibility, in the sense that patterns found in the first study would be compared with those in the subsequent study to see if there was much variation. For example, if a task that evoked extended silence in the first group also evoked silence in the second group, it can be suggested that this task contains mental processing characteristics, otherwise the task would be regarded as having an arbitrary nature. That is, learners would respond to it in the way they like and according to who they are, as that task might be neutral for not inducing any specific learning behaviour. In a word, the investigation attempted to expose any potential connection between materials design and the mind of the learner. I anticipated that if this could be achieved, our understanding of task dynamics would stretch beyond the current knowledge in ELT. Both studies aimed to find out: • task types that trigger silent processing • task types that elicit spontaneous verbal participation • task types that evoke both silence and speech • factors influencing learner choices of speech versus silence

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Table 9.1 Common task types in language learning No.

Task type

Explanation

Examples

1

Improvisational tasks

Oral practice focusing on process rather than product, having a flexible, informal, interactive, and experimental nature, encouraging free selfexpression

2

Rehearsal tasks

Having a planning nature, practising for the next step, building skills or elements that will later develop into a whole

3

Explanatory tasks

Having an investigative or analytical nature

4

Communication and negotiation

Having a social nature, founded on the idea of gaps such as information gap, opinion gap, perspective gap, interest gap

5

Collaborative projects

Distribution of labour, taking different duties, cooperating with peers, giving mutual support, contributing efforts to a shared responsibility

Pronunciation practice, reciprocal sharing of life experiences, exchanging personal information, hobbies, families, greeting, self-introduction, making an appointment, everyday routine, favourite food, describing a picture, asking for directions, giving simple advice Memorising words, studying sentence patterns, preparing a speech, presenting viewpoints, comparing ideas, taking notes of a phone message to pass it on Describing a phenomenon, justifying what to bring to survive a desert island, completing the sentences so that they are true for you, predicting the future, figuring out language rules, comparing behaviour in different cultures, responding to unreal conditions or coping with imagined problems Exchanging personal opinions on an issue, talking about phobias and therapies, discussing tips to keep the house tidy, identifying great cities to live in, sharing views on what happiness is, sharing positive or negative experiences during travel, roleplay of a hotel check-in scenario, role-play of a shopping incident Teams making a video clip, coproducing a poster, competition, group presentation, staging a short play, co-designing an advertisement or commercial, staging a job interview

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Table 9.1 (cont.) No.

Task type

Explanation

Examples

6

Independent tasks

To be performed individually, working alone, being selfreliant, not prone to peer support

7

Readiness tasks or pre-tasks

Serving to warm up an active learning mood, arousing curiosity, helping learners tune to a topic, generating initial thoughts

8

Follow-up tasks or post-tasks

Consolidating knowledge, strengthening skills, expanding on what was learned, trying alternative ways of exploiting the same content, diversifying language use

9

Deductive tasks

Working on logic, applying rules, making sentences, forming words based on formulas

10

Discovery tasks

Having an inductive nature, putting pieces of information together to make sense, using intuition where possible, working alone or in teams

11

Creative and problemsolving tasks

Being innovative, using imagination, demonstrating divergent thinking, aiming for novel ideas, expressing individuality, exploring new possibilities

12

Mixed-type tasks

Containing elements from any of the above task types

Reading comprehension, essay writing, listening to a text and filling in a table with information, summarising a novel, identifying a brilliant invention that changed the world, recognising a tradition that no longer exists, expressing nostalgia towards customs of the past Ice breakers, brainstorming words or ideas, gathering news from the Internet, inviting personal reflection on experiences, coming up with important tips for the first day at a new office, thinking of problems for seeking advice Making personal comments, sharing further thoughts on an issue, drawing implications or lessons from real events, discussing the moral of the story, talking about dreams and meanings, writing an alternative ending of a plot, developing a dialogue based on a story Form-focused exercises, filling a text with appropriate vocabulary, explaining how something works, identifying what is missing, evaluating a policy Finding a method, noticing patterns, generating rules, gathering various pieces of information to make meaning, identifying the climax in a story, explaining inconsistency, expressing impressions of an event Discussing choices, problems, preferences, attitudes, viewpoints, looking for a solution to a challenging scenario, playing with imagination, writing a poem, constructing a story, building a model Group report, movie or book discussion, forum discussion, excursion, museum visits

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Before data collection, an informative session was organised for participants to attend and listen to an explanation of all the tasks. The session aimed to help participants understand what each task category involved. In this meeting, learners were guided to see that every category included a string of tasks that might look different but shared the same pedagogical intention and learning objective. Concrete examples were then provided for illustration and participants asked questions to ensure clarity. Once everyone felt they knew each task well, they would be able to recall how they had performed it in their learning experience and could describe how they were most likely to respond to that task. Let us now turn to the report of these two studies. 9.5

Study 2: Learner Responses to Language Tasks in Australia

Following a phenomenological approach, this study explored how international students respond to tasks. Ten student participants from China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia who were studying at an Australian university in Melbourne were involved. Each took part in a one-hour in-depth interview. I collected data by giving participants the above-presented annotated list of twelve task types. Based on that, I documented how learners coped with them through both silence and speech as well as through both modes. The main interview questions for each task included: • Does the task allow you to participate right away? • What enables you to participate at ease without much preparation? • Does the task require some silent time? Why? • How much silent time do you need? • What do you do during and after that silent moment? • In this task, do you think first then talk, or the other way around? Using personal judgment, learning skills, preference, and imagination, participants narrated how they would go through each task, step by step. In doing so, they also elaborated on whom they would speak to, at which stage of the activity, and how much and what could be said. When some silent thinking was required in a task, they also identified at which stage they did so, for how long and why. Below is a summary of the main findings from this project. Drawn from data, the study managed to identify four major types of task design. Tasks That Trigger Silent Processing Four types of tasks that facilitate the silent learning mode are independent tasks, preparations or pre-tasks, deductive tasks, and discovery or inductive tasks. Some common features among these task types include the need for individual thinking time, not requiring peer interaction, challenging the mind, inviting personal reflection, asking for a written response, and requiring cognitive processing of rules or methods. As one learner reveals: ‘Tasks with

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9.6 Responses from Indonesian & Filipino Students

149

thoughtful, complex and demanding content will keep me in quiet thinking; those that require formal presentation in front of the class also prompt me to prepare my ideas in silence.’ Tasks That Elicit Verbalisation Five task types that require more talk include fluency tasks, rehearsal tasks, communication and negotiation tasks, collaborative projects, and follow-up discussion or post-tasks. The common characteristic of these types is that they involve collaborating with peers, with an emphasis on verbal fluency, rehearsal, communication, collaboration, and sharing. Since the cognitive demand of these tasks is light, they require quick thinking and spontaneous reactions. Participants explain that tasks that go well with their knowledge and experience will give them the confidence to speak out without preparation. Tasks of an informal nature that require no right or wrong answer also make them feel relaxed enough to participate. Tasks That Involve Both Silence and Talk Mixed-typed tasks that involve both modes of response often contain multiple layers or components, which demand some alternation between silence and talk. For example, a rehearsal activity for oral presentation might require silent note-taking to be followed by speech. A problem-solving task might include quiet reasoning before sharing. Tasks that invite an exchange of attitudes, viewpoints, preferences, and experiences might prompt students to reflect quietly or talk easily to one another. Team projects, such as making a movie, designing a poster, or joining a trip, also take place through thinking independently and consulting partners. Tasks That Do Not Induce Any Common Response Pattern The remaining two task types on the list – explanatory/analytical tasks and creative/problem-solving tasks – do not fall into any of the three categories mentioned above. This is because the respondents differed so greatly in their responses that it seemed impossible to identify any pattern. Drawn from the interview data, it was the personality, mood, and preference of each learner that played a part in how they would cope with these tasks. For easy reading, this report only provides a very concise summary of the research findings. A full-fledged discussion of this project, including research methodology, context, a synthesis chart, in-depth analysis, and direct quotes from data, can be found in Bao (2020b). 9.6

Study 3: Indonesian and Filipino Students Responding to Language Tasks

In this investigation of how learners from Indonesia and the Philippines cope with tasks, I replicated the same research design as that in Stage 2 to see how learners might respond differently to the same task types. The same questions

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were included in a questionnaire for 260 students who studied at different universities in Indonesia and the Philippines. With the help of a research assistant, I collected data through a questionnaire survey on 191 students from Indonesia and 69 students from the Philippines. Because of the larger number of participants compared with that in the previous study, the method of data collection was shifted from an interview to a survey. For convenience in responding, a coding system was created whereby each participant has a choice from these four options: talking spontaneously (T), thinking quietly (S), thinking before talking (ST), or talking before thinking (TS). After considering their learning behaviour, participants then noted down their very brief responses next to each activity type by using the above initials (S, T, ST, or TS). One open-ended question was added to the instrument that asked students to explain any of their choices. Data were then collated for the identification of patterns. Below are the findings from this project. 9.6.1

Findings from Indonesia

Indonesian participants prioritise silence over speech in most tasks. Even when a task requires peer interaction, such as in exploratory tasks and collaborative tasks, many of them would prefer to prepare silently before speaking. Some learners explain that this phenomenon has to do with the local classroom culture that often requires more listening than speaking. In many cases, if a class has more introverted students than extroverted students, silence easily becomes the dominant behaviour. Besides, classroom teaching styles also affect learning habits, due to the lack of time for and guidance in verbal discussion. Unexpectedly, many participants prefer silence even when it comes to tasks that elicit verbal contributions such as exploratory tasks and follow-up tasks. Furthermore, the second most dominant response to tasks is silence and then talk. On top of that, pure talking response seldom takes place unless the fluency task seems extremely easy. There is no apparent inclination towards talk and silence response. 9.6.2

Findings from the Philippines

Filipino participants, meanwhile, use silence mainly in response to independent tasks and pre-tasks. When it comes to fluency tasks, communication, and negotiation tasks, they still favour a little silent thinking before speaking. Overall, silence exists in most tasks, in the sense that in cognitive tasks silence would be prolonged and in negotiation tasks silence would be

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9.7 Cross-Case Analysis

151

brief. Most learners seem careful with their participation. They spend some time processing the given information before speaking up. In their explanation, some participants mentioned their reluctance to make mistakes because the classroom culture in the Philippines places emphasis on accuracy and rigour, while the socio-cultural setting highlights silence as a form of respect and morality. Others elaborated that some teachers can be overpowering and intimidating, which somehow shapes students’ cautious habits in self-expression. A more complete discussion of this study, including research methodology, context, a synthesis chart, and in-depth analysis, can be found in Bao and Ye (2020). 9.7

Study 4: Cross-Case Analysis

This is a comparative exploration between the two sets of responses in Studies 2 and 3 to reveal and consolidate response patterns. Speaking of patterns, it was discovered that while the participants in Australia draw a clear line between when they need silence and words respectively, the Indonesian and Filipino learners employ more silence in most tasks. However, the latter groups do not treat all tasks in the same way. Instead, they explain that tasks of a highly cognitive nature prompt longer silence than tasks for fluency rehearsal. The fact that these learners need to think before talking, even with easy topics such as hobbies or family, is that they are cautious and wish to sound good when they participate. The students in Australia, in the meantime, do not need to prepare if they know their topic well enough. Data from the two projects reveal that, most of all, the nature of tasks will decide how much silence is needed. There are, at the same time, five other factors that come into play in how learners cope with tasks: exposure to English, the personal need for different amounts of silence, learner experience with academic pressure, personality, and individual interests in learning content. Below is the explanation of each element. 9.7.1

Exposure to English

Differences in exposure to English can govern how confident the learner is in jumping into the deep end and participating or if they prefer to exercise some verbal caution first. Drawn from data in both projects, factors that influence learner choices include task characteristics, linguistic confidence, sociocultural habits, classroom norms, and individual personalities. The participants in Australia, having been exposed to the English language and the Australian academic culture, seem to exercise more autonomy and confidence in expressing themselves. Besides, the smaller class size, coupled with the ‘laidback’

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Table 9.2 Differing responses to fluency tasks Number of participants

Context

Silence

Talk

Silence & talk

Talk & silence

10 191 69

Australia Indonesia Philippines

0% 29.3% 20.3%

70% 39.2% 14.1%

0% 27.2% 33.3%

20% 4.2% 7.2%

classroom culture of Australia that emphasises creative ideas and spontaneous sharing over rules and order, often makes verbal communication stress-free. On top of that, the cost of tuition fees and living expenses also motivate students to make an effort in their studies to get their money’s worth. Outside of their study programmes, competition in the job market and the pressure in higher academic pursuits constantly drive students to keep perfecting their skills and voicing their needs. The demonstration of such confidence, for example, is shown clearly through how all the students cope with fluency tasks. While the participants in Australia respond to fluency tasks with more speech (70 per cent), their Indonesian and Filipino counterparts use more thinking time (29.3 per cent and 20.3 per cent respectively). It is also noticed that the responses of the latter two groups are more similar to each other (29.3 per cent and 20.3 per cent) than to the former group (Table 9.2). 9.7.2

Amounts of Silence

Different amounts of silent thinking are specified by the three groups of participants. Besides fluency tasks, the participants in Australia are also comfortable with rehearsal, communication, negotiation, and collaboration tasks. By contrast, the other two groups prefer to process their thoughts first when performing these tasks. In all the responses to these task types, only 10 per cent of participants in Australia choose to think before speaking while up to 80 per cent of them choose to speak right away. The Indonesian participants, who are based in a country where English exposure is minimal, exhibit more silent behaviour (with nearly 40 per cent staying silent), while the Filipinos, who are exposed to both English and the mother tongue, are slightly less silent but still need to think somehow (with nearly 30 per cent staying silent). 9.7.3

Academic Pressure

Different experiences with academic pressure can influence how a task is to be handled. While the other two groups prefer to use some silence across all kinds of tasks, the international students in Australia use silence mainly in complex

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mental processing such as problem-solving and analytical tasks. The pressure of academic study in Australian universities seems demanding in both timing and outcome. For example, when it comes to preparing class presentations, they are aware of the need to speak English quickly since the presentation is often firmly timed and critically graded. By and large, learners are not independent decision-makers but factors such as the history of communication and the academic environment dictate how they cope with tasks. 9.7.4

Personality

Personality is another factor that comes into how one chooses to speak or think harder. For example, while some reflective students prefer to write down their thoughts, their highly articulate peers might go ahead and participate verbally. The change of mood is an additional nuance to this factor. A quiet learner might occasionally be inspired by classroom discussion and open up more than usual. An articulate learner might experience the dominant silence of a new class and would rather observe or wait before feeling comfortable enough to talk freely. This is a phenomenon that these projects could not explore because there was no condition for the participants to sit together in the same class where their behaviour might result from peer influence. 9.7.5

Individual Interests

As shown by data, individual interests represent another factor that causes learners to respond diversely to the same task. For example, an idea that provokes deep thoughts in one learner might be less important to another and so, while the former chooses to stay with that issue by thinking hard, the latter simply utters a few words and moves on to something else. To support all kinds of interests and personalities, task developers might consider providing explicit suggestions for silent processing, verbal responses, or self-talk when necessary. One example provided by Wilkinson and Olliver-Gray (2006) is an instruction that guides students to write down how they feel during exam time and then compare their responses with peers. Stickler et al. (2007) suggest that task designers can specify which part of a task does not involve speaking and can allocate specific moments when students are expected to reflect or silently type their thoughts. Such instructions show evidence that materials developers can consider, including strategies to assist students in coping with the learning process. According to Gal’perin (1992), based on Vygotsky’s philosophy of development principles, instruction plays a role in shaping the route of mental development.

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As the cross-case analysis reveals, some tasks evoke a great deal of silent thinking and, on the contrary, other tasks facilitate quick speech. In between these two categories, there are also mixed tasks that contain the features of both. The mixed category, however, can be quite complex. It might contain cognition and spontaneity mixed in one act or it might contain these two domains one after the other. In a word, four patterns emerged which show how different types of language tasks influence decisions towards verbal and non-verbal responses (Figure 9.1). Figure 9.1 shows four categories of language learning activities: • Cognitive tasks that demand some silent time have a strong cognitive nature due to their complex contents that require intensive mental processing. • Spontaneous tasks can elicit quick, personal answers without much thinking owing to an experiential nature that taps into learner experience. • Simultaneously cognitive-spontaneous tasks with a hybrid nature for being thought-provoking and experience-related at the same time can evoke both verbal and reflective responses. In coping with these tasks, learners have a choice between thinking first or talking first.

Cognitive tasks

Spontaneous tasks

Simultaneously cognitivespontaneous tasks

Procedurally cognitive and spontaneous tasks

Figure 9.1 A task-type pyramid

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• Procedurally cognitive-spontaneous tasks with multiple steps that invite silence and verbal participation one after another. The progression alternates between mental processing and follow-up speech, a formula that might repeat several times within a task. Learners do not have much choice but need to perform silent work before being able to participate. Although the projects disclose these clear inclinations, it would be helpful to keep in mind that learners in the everyday changing scenario of the classroom may not always be consistent in their behaviour. Occasionally, some might modify their style and cope with highly cognitive content by thinking aloud. Others might remain cautious about language choice and prefer to talk quietly to themselves. In a word, the distinction of task types mentioned above may not be absolute but subject to variations. 9.8

Study 5: Exploring the Distribution of Task Type in a Coursebook

This study examined how task types are distributed in a global coursebook titled English File by Latham-Koenig et al. (2019), which includes six levels, namely beginner, elementary, lower-intermediate, intermediate, upperintermediate, and advanced. The choice of coursebook comes from the popularity of the materials. From conversations with teachers, I learned that English File has been used in a wide range of countries in five continents. The analysis had three objectives. The investigation aimed to see whether a popular global coursebook might lean towards tasks that provoke more silence or tasks that elicit more speech. This was to understand if course-writers subconsciously design activities that promote quick speech or challenge the mind to think. My hypothesis based on this inquiry was that, if most tasks in the book only supported spontaneous talk, it would not have much cognitive value and thus the learning in this book may not need to include silence. On the contrary, if the book offered predominantly cognitively demanding work, silence would be required and it would be unreasonable for teachers to keep forcing learners to speak without preparation. My inspection of the materials showed far more activities that require some silent work in them than activities that do not. Specifically, out of 213 tasks in the entire course, 147 are cognitive work that would involve learners in mental processing of information to produce ideas (69.02 per cent of the total number) while only 66 are fluency work that would allow for spontaneous participation or interaction (30.98 per cent of the total number). This structure of task distribution suggests that two-thirds of all tasks in the title require thoughtful procedures for effective learning performance (Tables 9.3 and 9.4). Such procedures would show learners how to go through the activities rather than simply telling them what to do.

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Table 9.3 One hundred and forty-seven cognitive tasks

Level

Independent tasks

Preparation tasks

Deductive tasks

Discovery tasks

Beginner Elementary Pre-intermediate Intermediate Upper-intermediate Advanced

12 11 19 32 11 42

12 16 16 44 17 56

12 16 21 20 16 42

12 15 15 6 10 7

Table 9.4 Sixty-six fluency tasks Level

Fluency tasks

Exploratory tasks

Follow-up tasks

Game-like tasks

Beginner Elementary Pre-intermediate Intermediate Upper-intermediate Advanced

12 10 15 14 12 11

12 1 15 4 14 3

12 8 12 25 15 35

12 2 13 3 13 0

Table 9.5 Comparing two task types Level

Cognitive tasks

Fluency tasks

Beginner Elementary Pre-intermediate Intermediate Upper-intermediate Advanced

48 48 71 102 98 147

48 13 54 53 56 66

Table 9.5 shows the numerical variations in the two task types across all the six proficiency levels of English as intended and prescribed by the title. At the beginner level, the distribution between cognitive and fluency tasks is precisely equal, with the number of both task types being forty-eight. However, throughout the rest of the volumes, the number of cognitive tasks surges gradually, in the sense that the more advanced the volume becomes, the amount of cognitive

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work goes up (i.e. 48, 48, 71, 102, 98, and 147 sequentially). In other words, when learners move forward to learn more English, their cognitive load escalates. In the meanwhile, their fluency practice does not change much (i.e. 48, 13, 54, 53, 56, and 66 sequentially), with an average of forty-eight tasks across all the volumes if the total number of fluency tasks is divided by six volumes. While the development of the cognitive requirement of the course strikingly moves up by more than three times (from 47 to 147), the development of fluency requirement only changes slightly, increasing by just 27 per cent (from 48 to 66). The difference in the evolvement of the two activity types suggests that to make progress in their English proficiency learners must take on and cope with a considerable amount of cognitive pressure. At the same time, the practice of building fluent proficiency rises minimally as learners travel from spontaneous casual practice to more intense brainwork if they wish to achieve high ability. The gradual expansion of the cognitive domain throughout six different levels in the course suggests that if learners wish to advance their English skills, it is not improvisational speech alone but deep thinking that serves as a productive approach to language practice. Although this pattern comes from one single case of study, it is a reminder that materials writers cannot reject the presence of intensive brainwork in language learning by creating tasks that are easy for speaking all the time. Instead, across all tasks in a coursebook, writers need to consider both linguistic and cognitive domains. Luchini (2010) argues that it is the demand in both language and cognition that places pressure on learner performance. Due to this pressure, silence can serve as a facilitating space for learners to cope with any arising anxiety. If the teacher, without this awareness, forces students to verbally contribute without much preparation, that teacher unknowingly intensifies the burden on students and might ruin their interest or reduce their motivation. To demonstrate how task design can connect with learner silence, speech, and both modes, the next section will provide a range of examples taken from a variety of English coursebooks. 9.9

Examples of Tasks Requiring More Silence Than Speech

Learning activities of advanced cognitive nature often require learners to process information internally. Such processing might include, for example, making choices and justifying them, problem-solving, personal reflection, and value judgment. These actions contain the strong potential to lead to meaningful speech, that is, valuable ideas and well-chosen language. Three decades ago, Nunan (1991) stated that developing cognitive tasks is intensely difficult as the writer needs to show control of multiple factors at the same time. At a sentence level, such factors are content, syntax, vocabulary, idioms,

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pronunciation, and stress. At a discourse level, the main factors include context, role, cohesion, persuasiveness, negotiation of meaning, and intended communication impact. On top of that, every task also requires a procedure, a learning aim, and an opportunity for personalised enjoyment. ‘Describing change’, an activity from Solutions Advanced by Falla and Davies (2008, p. 37), invites learners to express their attitudes towards change. One would reflect on what kind of change they welcome and what they prefer to remain the same over the years. This type of task demands extended planning of thoughts before articulating them. A similar activity task called ‘Preserving the past’, from a Vietnamese textbook of English titled English 9 Volume 1 by MOET (2019b), invites learners to be nostalgic. It states that life has changed so much over the past fifty years that some traditions or customs have disappeared. Learners are then asked to, individually, identify a cultural practice that has been phased out over the years and express interest in seeing it come back, with an explanation of their wish. The task requires some level of reflection and reasoning. The ‘A murder mystery’ activity from English File Elementary by LathamKoenig et al. (2019, p. 62) has learners read the beginning part of a story about a murder case and then, without looking at the text, study a photo to recognise characters in the story by names and professions. Learners then listen to a TV adaptation of the story and fill in information in a chart to construct the movement of the characters. After comparing their charts with a partner, learners continue to listen to the rest of the story to identify some of the victims. The activity focuses on both content and syntax. 9.10

Examples of Tasks Requiring More Speech Than Silence

Tasks that allow easy speech are of an experiential, improvisational, or informal nature. These effects will be robust if the classroom atmosphere is stress-free and if the teacher proves to be friendly, humorous and knows how to encourage learner involvement. One way of encouraging is to include in the task some samples of untidy natural language and speech repair to show that perfection is not expected. This can be seen in some textbooks such as the Cambridge English Course (Swan & Walter, 1984). Learners can see that sometimes a sentence can contain no verbs, such as ‘Somewhere nice?’, ‘As usual’ (p. 28), ‘Over where?’, ‘Landing now’ (p. 65), and so on. The spontaneous mood would also be enhanced if the task content was related to learners’ general knowledge and real-life experience. This would activate learner confidence about the topic. Below are tasks taken from recent English coursebooks that are popular in different countries.

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A warm-up activity in Empower Advanced by Doff et al. (2016, p. 64) invites learners to state what social media they use, how often they comment or post something, and if it is a good idea to discuss work or study on social media. A similar activity on the same topic in another coursebook, English 12 (MOET, 2019d, p. 57), organises for learners to interview each other in small groups and report the outcome to the class regarding choices of social media and how they are used. Since this theme is close to learners’ everyday lives, it is easy to relate and improvise an informal chat about social habits. The activity ‘Ask and answer about you’ in Family and Friends by Thompson (2015, p. 47) provides a box with expressions in it including ‘get up’, ‘have breakfast’, ‘start school’, ‘finish school’, ‘have dinner’, and ‘go to bed’ and asks learners to have conversations such as ‘What time do you get up?’, ‘I get up at five-thirty’, and so on. In a Vietnamese textbook of English titled English 6 (MOET, 2019a, p. 40), students are paired up to talk about how they enjoy playing or watching football, and where and how much time they spend enjoying football as a sport or hobby. A follow-up task for this activity then requires mental processing and preparation time when learners are invited to imagine they are a famous footballer who will be interviewed by a journalist about their game tournaments and secrets to their achievements. The task ‘Situation – storytelling’ in Communication Strategies 1 by Paul (2008, p. 23) divides the class into two teams. The teacher provides a storytelling structure and invites each group to think of a story that every group member knows well. The story can be from a television series, a book, a movie, news, or folk tales. Sitting in a circle if possible, every person then takes turns making one sentence, in speaking, to construct the story. In a competition, the teacher sets the time limit for each person to make their sentence and if they succeed their team will score one point. The task aims to help learners develop fluency through enjoyable stories and in the exciting atmosphere of a contest. ‘Speak with Confidence’ in Speak Now 1 by Richards and Bohlke (2012, p. 17) asks learners to pair up and take turns asking each other questions about time availability to make an appointment. Before that, students are given a timetable to note down what they would do during this week. This exchange is straightforward as it does not require much thinking: learners simply look at their schedule and say, ‘I’m busy that day going to class’ in response to a question such as ‘Are you free on Friday?’. Such conversation is considered natural and true to life because two learners exchange information they genuinely do not know about each other. When interactions resemble authentic social situations, learners are likely to develop communication skills for the real world (Ellis, 2003). Because of the improvisational nature of these tasks, learners are expected to speak more than keep quiet. Some might hesitate to a small degree to gather

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language and confidence, but they need to speak. If silence dominates during these activities, then something must be going wrong. Perhaps student proficiency is too low; the learning content fails to inspire; the teacher does not know how to encourage and manage participation; some learners may be ill, passive, or lazy. In a word, silence should not be the main response during these activities. 9.11

Examples of Tasks Involving Both Silence and Speech

An analytical task called ‘Project’ from Family and Friends 5 by Thompson (2014, p. 33) asks learners to think of a cultural or artistic event and make a poster of it. Components of the poster are given, including names of artists, attractive features, visuals, schedules, and ticket costs. Posters are then displayed in a room and students walk around to improvise conversations in which they comment on the posters and imagine planning to attend the events that seem most interesting to them. Such planning might require both silent work and speech. ‘Responding to policies’, an activity in Solutions Pre-intermediate (Falla & Davies, 2018, p. 105), asks learners to consider a local council’s decision to stop giving concessions to teenage under eighteen to travel on buses. Learners in pairs then brainstorm ideas for a letter to the authority expressing their concern about how the policy is unhelpful to the social environment. If we break down the process of this activity, there are several steps to be covered, which include thinking of both the pros and cons of the policy, deciding how the latter might overrun the former, and structuring the letter before writing it. Silence not only occurs in the letter-writing act itself, which seems obvious, but ideas being generated to go into that letter would need to be intelligent for the local authority to feel convinced enough to change their mind. Such complex responsive tasks, according to Barkley, Cross, and Major (2014) and Aygün and Aydın (2016), involve critical thinking skills such as summarising main points, organising thoughts on them, and weaving them into a coherent argument. Even when thoughts can be produced quickly, putting them together to achieve an impact would take time as it demands some brain work. This is evident in the procedure for the task as presented in the textbook showing several steps, such as looking for relevant words, constructing opinions, developing coherence, analysing the scenario, and giving a presentation. 9.12

Recommended Tasks for Creative Silence

Having identified the above patterns, I do not wish to create the impression that each task type must result in some anticipated behaviour. That would seem unrealistic in the social world of complex communication because exceptions

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or variations might occasionally occur in learner response to tasks depending on individual personality, linguistic proficiency, and everyday changeable learning situations. I argue that the understanding of task effect on learning styles should not make course writers and teachers feel mechanical in developing or adapting materials. Instead, our knowledge about task dynamics in relation to learning behaviour should allow coursebook authors, teachers, and learners to become creative after they take more control of what materials can do. To demonstrate this point, I would like to present a few innovative tasks that offer opportunities for productive silence to take place and lead to high-quality output. These tasks seem enjoyable, at least as I witnessed them in English classrooms and at teacher development workshops. They make use of fictional literature, drama, drawings, music, movies, and personal experiences. Together, these resources encourage imagination and playful moments in learning. By sharing them, I wish to challenge the common belief that to create learning enjoyment, students must talk all the time. Instead, the message to pass around is that silence too can be fun. The recommended activities contain the following characteristics: • The silent moment is pleasant. • The teacher knows when to keep quiet. • The learning resource is inspiring. • Learners actively process meaning. • Silence denotes creative engagement. • The instruction shows a clear sequence of scaffolding. • Silence does not work alone but is connected to speech. • Silence yields (verbal, written, or comprehension) output. • Silence leads to high-quality social sharing of personal meaning. 9.12.1

Composing Poems Based on Guided Intuition

We keep silent not only to listen to others but also to listen to ourselves. Based on this awareness, learners can be exposed to multisensory experiences to trigger their imagination of sounds, gestures, and situations. With such resources being planted in their minds, learners are then allowed time to reproduce their responses in silence, such as by talking to themselves, writing a text, or drawing a picture. In one of my tasks, students listen to instrumental music and visualise images emerging in that music to later use for writing a poem. The task follows these steps: • An instrumental lullaby titled ‘Timeless Motion’ by Daniel Kobialka is played (which is available on YouTube). • Students keep their eyes closed as in meditation and allow their minds to respond innovatively by visualising images and movements.

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• Students write down those elements in a provided handout including these categories: images, sound, location, time, movement, mood, and living things. • Students write a poem based on a provided poem structure. The structure contains an action and a time, a sound and a location, another action and a conclusion. • Students share their poems with peers or present their poems to the class. The following is an example of how my students responded to this activity. They noted down images (such as dew drops, bridge, the moon, and cloud), sounds (rain, birds chirping, wind, leaves falling, laughter, and tears), locations (garden, forest, mountain, and stream), time (midnight and summer), actions (walk, run, dance, giggle, sleep, wake up), and moods (hope, sorrow, peace). In small groups, they chose their favourite words and collectively wrote this poem: Secret silence I fall asleep on a cloud Birds chirping, angels singing In heaven’s garden the wind whispering and children giggling I open my eyes In the soft green forest leaves falling Ecstasy.

Another activity, adapted by Maley (2018) from an idea by Spiro (2004), encourages the construction of metaphors to express feelings and abstract notions in creative ways. Here is the procedure. • Being provided with the vocabulary in Table 9.6, learners are invited to combine any word from the first column with any phrase in the second column by joining them with ‘is’. By playing with random combinations of pairs, learners might produce surprising ideas such as Love is a dream Marriage is an alarm clock Disappointment is a brush Anger is a vacuum cleaner

• Learners are encouraged to expand their sentence by adding one more idea to it, such as: Love is a dream and marriage is an alarm clock Disappointment is a brush that sweeps away all your hopes Anger is a vacuum cleaner that sucks up all your energy

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Table 9.6 A task introduced by Maley (2018, p. 46) Abstract concept

Concrete object or event

hope life marriage love anger disappointment work happiness time hatred fear

a vacuum cleaner a knife an egg a brush a window a mirror a dream a rope a bus a cup an alarm clock

• Everyone shares their sentences with other class members. Alternatively, learners can perform the task in small groups and collectively write a short poem. For example: Disappointment is a brush: It sweeps away all our hopes And throws them in the rubbish bin.

Such poems can be read out loud to the whole class. During the performance, learners employ both silence and talk. However, as the task progresses, more cognitive work is involved because once the two words are put together, the mind must look for connection and explanation. The task is engaging as it plays with personal meaning and novel ideas. This process fosters creative thinking, playfulness, social sharing, cooperation, and critical thinking. 9.12.2

Writing Lyrics Based on a Popular Tune

This is an activity that I created based on a simple music melody. Below are the instructions: • Listen to the melody of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ (which can be found on YouTube). • Hum the melody until you memorise it. • Come up with a string of words on the same theme, which could be animals, cities, school subjects, colours, emotions, and so on. Write them down. • Now fit those words into the tune that you remember. Sing this song to yourself before sharing it with a peer.

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An alternative way of performing this task can be group work. Here is an example of a story produced by my students which they sang to the class, following the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ tune: Giraffe, monkey, elephant Dog, cat, emu, alligator they run away from the zoo but none of them wears any shoes giraffe, monkey, elephant dog, cat, emu, alligator they run away from people and live happily in the jungle.

Besides stories, the topic could be arguing, shopping, asking for directions, doing housework, hobbies, and so on. Below is another example of lyrics that involve a dialogue between a customer and a shop assistant, based on the same tune. Two students can sing it together on a turn-taking basis: a. Do you have a denim shirt? b. Oh yes, I do. Here it is. a. How much is it? please tell me. b. It’s twenty-five-fifty cents. a. Really? Why so expensive? b. ’Cause it’s of great quality a. Could you make it just twenty? b. Okay, well, then, here you are. a. Thank you, very kind of you. b. Was great doing business with you.

If there is someone in the class (including the teacher) who can play an instrument such as the guitar or ukulele, this person can provide musical accompaniment when each group presents their lyrics by singing to the class for enjoyment and reflection on the meaning of the words. In one lesson, I use the song ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega. To inspire students, I share the story behind this song in which Suzanne, who was not a musician and had never composed a song before, decided to make a song for fun that became a hit. 9.12.3

Dramatisation from Listening

Learners while listening to a story or narrative of an event act out what the characters in it are doing. This is to demonstrate how they comprehend the text and have a good time. After that, learners are invited to reproduce the same story or write a similar poem. This idea is proposed by Tomlinson (2001a) who was inspired by Total Physical Response (TPR) as a teaching approach that

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stimulates the imaginative mind through dramatisation for listening comprehension. An activity called ‘They came from the sea’ by Tomlinson (2004/2007) takes learners through these steps: • Think of a beach. • Draw your beach on a piece of paper. • Show your beach to somebody else and tell them about it. • Now turn this sheet over so that you can’t read it and listen to your teacher. When the teacher starts telling the story, learners listen and act as characters in it. In this story, learners are playing different leisure activities on the beach when they suddenly heard a strange humming noise coming from the sea. Then four strange creatures appear and take two people prisoner before disappearing back into the sea. The listening contains details about movements and actions that elicit a dramatic response without speech as a way of demonstrating comprehension. Although learners are silent throughout most of the task, their senses are open and they learn through activating them. In the end, learners are provided with the story to read and learn it again through reading and speaking. 9.12.4

Visualisation from Literary Stimuli

Stevick (1986) argues that readers’ exposure to texts has the power of bringing words into their minds, pictures into their imagination, sounds to their ears, and emotions into their hearts. Taking this understanding further, Tomlinson (2000; 2001b) proposes a range of tasks that creatively utilise these inherent resources by activating learners’ sensory imaging, inner speech, personal connections, and affective response. He would invite learners to visualise the main character, talk to themselves about how an announcement relates to them, think of similar situations, and focus on how they feel about events. Such tasks allow space for thinking before talking whereby learners imagine, draw, relate, articulate views, recount episodes from real lives, share knowledge, and make predictions. Although all these happen before learners experience the text, they truly help learners interact with that text. Tomlinson (2003a) argues that every activity can start either in the mind or in the text. If the former takes place, learners can use their personal experience to make sense of the text, which would be more meaningful than using a text to make sense of students’ lives. While the former makes learning experiential, the latter keeps learning too controlled. For example, before studying a text about embarrassment, learners can be asked to visualise embarrassing moments in their own lives to help them to empathise with the sufferer in the text. If the text is about tourists, they can be asked to act out in groups typical tourist scenarios in their region. Such multi-dimensional experiences have the power

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to tap into learners’ affective associations (Masuhara, 2005; Tomlinson, 2011; Guerrero, 2005; Wiley, 2006; Tomlinson and Avila, 2007a, 2007b). Here is an example of task instruction: You’re going to listen to a poem about a child’s first day at school. Imagine that you are that child and that you are standing alone in the playground at the beginning of your first day at school. As you listen to the poem, try to see in your mind what the child could see in the playground. (Tomlinson, 2003b, p. 104)

A similar activity is introduced by Soars, Soars, and Sayer (2003) about the happiest person in Britain in which learners are invited to visualise something that makes them happy and describe their visualisations to each other in pairs. Learners can also imagine a happy person in their country and list what makes them happy. They write a description of ‘the happiest person’ in their own country and share that with a peer from a different background. Learners then read the text about ‘the happiest person in Britain’ and compare it with their passage. A third example of the task is based on ‘Vinegar’, a poem by Roger McGough (1983), which goes like this: Sometimes I feel like a priest in a fish & chip queue quietly thinking as the vinegar runs through how nice it would be to buy supper for two

After reading this, learners are invited to reflect on the same theme but put that in their context. They do so by responding to these ideas: • Think of a time when you felt lonely. See pictures in your mind of what made you feel lonely. • Form a group of four and tell each other about your experiences of being lonely. • In your group, discuss your answers to the following questions: • What sort of people live alone in your country? • If you lived alone, would you eat fast food? To facilitate this task design, Tomlinson (1997) proposes a helpful procedure: • You are going to read (or listen) to a poem about . . . • Before that, picture in your mind an image of . . . The next step then has two options: • Read the poem and build another image. • Compare the two images, or draw the picture from your mind on paper (or) draw as you read.

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Drawing Pictures through Visual Scaffolding

We are living in societies which rely so much on words as the dominant, if not sole, tool of communication that sometimes we forget that emotions and thoughts may not contain words at all. I have conducted experiments with children’s favourite tools of expression and communication in Australia, China, Thailand, and Vietnam. When I asked children to prepare and tell me about their dreams or wishes, most of them would draw pictures. Not only children but also many adults enjoy doodling as a graphic-thinking-aloud approach to construct meanings and share them. Based on this inclination, I created an activity known as ‘If I were’ (see Table 9.6) (Bao, 2018, p. 203). Here is the task procedure. • Learners are given this comic strip (Figure 9.2) in a handout for reading enjoyment.

Figure 9.2 ‘If I was a robot’. Source: Funny Junk website. www .funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/1236258/If

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• Learners are given a second handout in which the same comic strip now becomes an empty template (Figure 9.3). Based on this template, learners are invited to construct their own stories. The activity can be performed individually or in small groups. The template serves as a scaffolding tool for learners to come up with fictional ideas through the freedom to find their topic, practise a syntactic structure, contextualise language use, play with imagination, conceive communication among characters, relate compatible elements, develop logic, enjoy the learning process, share stories with classmates, and integrate the four macro skills. Along this line, many educational theorists have acknowledged the positive impact of learners’ drawings on cognitive competence (Piaget, 1956), language development (Kendrick & McKay, 2004), and the strengthening of writing abilities (Adoniou, 2013, 2015b). • The comic strips created by learners are shared with a peer and then presented to the class for enjoyment and interaction. Peers can ask questions or add more ideas if they wish.

Figure 9.3 ‘If I was a robot’ template

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Below are some creative drawings by students who responded to the activity (Figures 9.4 and 9.5). Although the scaffolding template is provided, learners can exercise the freedom to find their own topic, practise a syntactic structure, contextualise language use, play with imagination, conceive communication among characters, relate compatible elements, develop logic, have fun, share stories with classmates, and integrate the four macro skills. 9.12.6

Reading Silence in Movie Scenes

It might be useful to observe how silence speaks in movies. Since advanced sound technology replaced the silent film era (1895–1927) with dialogue, words have been employed increasingly and at times unnecessarily. To notice

Figure 9.4 ‘If I was a cat’ ‘If I was a cat, I would sleep all the time and keep eating. When I got angry, I’d threaten a mouse. And fight with others. I’d hang out with kitty. And date Doraemon.’

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Figure 9.5 ‘If I was a witch’ ‘If I was a witch, I would scare people. And I would cook any food with magical power. When I got angry, I’d ride a broom at high speed. And break some mountains. I’d hang out with Harry Potter. And date a handsome vampire.’

how silence can be a meaningful tool of meaning and communication, there are films worth studying such as Zatoichi Challenged (Kenji Misumi, 1967), Pushpak Vimana (John Krasinski, 1987), The Bear (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1988), The Artist (Michel Hazanavicus, 2011), A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018), and Silver Skates (Michael Lockshin, 2020), among many others. In these pictures, silence conveys far more than words and the frugality of dialogues exerts powerful emotional and perceptive impacts on the audience. Selected scenes from these movies can serve as inspiring discussions in language and art classrooms. This is because successful communicators are not those who talk endlessly but are those who are capable of hearing and interpreting meaning

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attentively. Movies are vivid resources for teaching students the importance of understanding subtle nuances of communication in contexts. A silence observation activity is introduced by Bao (2020a) in which learners are asked to listen to the final scene of Zatoichi Challenged, which opens with a dialogue between two people who are experiencing mutual confrontation. As the verbal exchanges become more intense, the characters find themselves speaking less and eventually withdraw into silence. As words are replaced with intense gestures, facial expressions, and actions, learners are invited to discuss each meaning as it is non-verbally expressed. In doing so, they are also encouraged to imagine how the impact of such moments would change if the characters spoke instead of acting silently. In a follow-up task, learners think about a moment in their life when not talking out loud seems to be the most appropriate choice to make. Below is the instruction for the task. • Think about a moment of tension or conflict that you have experienced. • Share that with a peer. • Watch the final scene of Zatoichi Challenged (which is available on YouTube). The first half contains a dialogue, so you need to listen; the second half takes place without words, so you need to observe. • In your view, does the climax of the scene happen in speech or silence? How? • If silent acting was replaced with dialogues, what would the characters be saying? Some of my students feel that the best part in the last scene is not the words but their frugality. After thinking and sharing, learners can reflect and write their responses to the scene or the topic of conflict. Here is a poem that came from this process: Like paper lanterns flowing down the river the souls of two warriors torn apart in the winter steel and snow, cold.

9.12.7

Soundwalking

A soundwalk is a stroll in nature or an urban location with a focus on listening to the environment. The term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project under the leadership of composer R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the 1970s. Soundwalking (Westerkamp, 1974) or soundscape (Gazi, Rizopoulos & Christidis, 2018) is defined as the act of exposing our mind and ears to every sound around us as a stimulus for perceptual, artistic, and emotional responses towards creativity. This tool has also been used as an artistic medium by visual artists, musicians, documentary makers, and

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occasionally by language teachers for learners to build ideas through both real life and imagination. In a soundwalk activity, learners are invited to leave the classroom and walk through a park or any convenient place of their own choice. They listen to sounds and characterise them in ways that they subjectively feel, such as strange sounds, sweet sounds, disturbing sounds, unrealistic sounds, and so on. Such sounds might evoke visual images, emotions, reactions, and experiences. With this substance, learners then return to the classroom and share their experience in a form they choose, which could be conversations, drawings, poems, or stories. The activity comprises silent observation and output based on that observation, which can be oral or written. Below is the procedure of this task, which can be put in a handout for students to follow: • Leave the classroom and walk through a park or a public place of your own choice. • Listen to sounds and characterise them in ways that reflect how you feel, such as strange sounds, sweet sounds, disturbing sounds, unrealistic sounds, and so on. • Connect those sounds with your images, emotions, reactions, and experiences. • Return to the classroom and share their experience in a form you choose, which could be conversations, drawings, poems, or stories. Here is a poem from one of my classes after a soundwalking experience: Pitter-patter pitter-patter Raindrops are nosey chatters falling on the windowpane driving me insane.

An alternative adaptation of this activity might involve observation that makes use of both physical eyes and the mind’s eyes. The whole idea of watching or listening is to practise moments of mindfulness, which can be powerful material for poetry. Speaking of this, I am reminded of the words of the poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran, who wrote: Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky We fell them down and turn them into paper That we may record our emptiness.

One important reason why silence in the above tasks is a pleasant experience is that it taps into learners’ voices. It has been acknowledged in the ELT discourse that materials which address the learner in an informal, personal voice are more likely to facilitate learning than those which use a distant, formal voice (Beck, McKeown & Worthy, 1995; Tomlinson, 2001b). Some meaningful elements that shape such a voice include concreteness (through examples and anecdotes), inclusiveness (that is, not signalling intellectual, linguistic, or cultural

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superiority over the learners), and the excitement from fantasy, imagination, or novelty. Along this line, Bao (2018) proposes several features of creative experiences that can be observed by task designers to make the process of silent reflection interesting. According to these features, tasks would need to • play with inner space • have a playful nature • require observation • evoke divergent thinking • enrich thinking and show a way of thinking • be connected to experience and personality but also extend these • involve walking in the shoes of others • yield ideas for sharing • involve adapting, imitating, or mimicking life (such as dramatisation) 9.13

Concluding Insights

In my experience and observation, activities that involve both silence and speech are often far more enjoyable than activities that require only speech. As demonstrated by the English File coursebook analysis reported in this chapter, it is the combination of verbal and thinking skills, rather than speech alone, that pushes L2 proficiency to an advanced level. One of the reasons why many teachers do not welcome learner silence is because silence itself is inherently ambiguous and it is hard to tolerate ambiguity. It is not silence that makes teaching difficult. It is teacher incompetence in the use of silence that does. From a learner perspective, however, silence makes sense as learners are aware of what they are doing and thus silence is not ambiguous to them. Instead, they know that it is the space for thoughts to emerge. According to conventional wisdom, if you can think in a language, you can really speak it. The connection between our inner life and social life is constant and robust: we frequently ponder on real-world experiences and our real-world experiences keep us pondering. Someone who learns to speak well for successful socialisation must also learn to think well for effective idealisation. To facilitate these abilities, classrooms and virtual classrooms need rich, thoughtful, and effective activities that take both verbal and mental processes into account. Arguably, silence can be useless and uncomfortable unless learners are given meaningful reasons to employ it in productive ways. Silence must not be aimless but needs to be organised towards an outcome. Silence is not a problem to be solved or a fact to be accepted; it is a skill to be developed and a reality to be experienced. The impact of tasks on silence and verbalisation is an extremely complex area. It would be impossible to come up with absolute rules for tasks to dictate

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the same responsive behaviour in all kinds of learners across all kinds of contexts. In many cases, it is teachers’ flexibility, supportive attitudes, and innovative pedagogical strategies that can improve task design by allowing both mental and verbal rehearsal to reach its optimum. Although many communicative tasks might expect learners to switch to an impulsive learning mode, during the actual classroom process some learners might choose to handle them more reflectively. This is because some might need more selfmonitoring time than others before a verbal exchange can take place. When this happens, the quality of classroom tasks should not be measured by how much speaking occurs but by the depth of learner engagement. This chapter does not mean to promote silence over verbalisation as a preferable way of coping with tasks. Instead, it only asks pedagogy to strategically acknowledge the mental processing that already exists in students’ learning repertoire. The reason for silence is not merely to contemplate but ultimately to move towards the rich and meaningful spoken word. The outcome of learners’ productive inner speech must be made public in some way, such as through verbal presentations, written notes, and learning journals for sharing so that all learners can benefit from the output of their peers. Even if learners employ silence intensively in their everyday learning, the opportunity for speech must be made accessible; that is, when quiet students feel ready to voice their thoughts then they should be granted stress-free conditions to do so. The balance between verbal and non-verbal learning, after all, must be kept in mind as a way of managing both the production and distribution of worthwhile ideas. Without good ideas, learning has no value and without the sharing of those ideas, learning would be nothing but a self-interested, lonely journey.

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Some Ideas for Silence Research

Our current knowledge of silence is founded on different concerns that do not seem to be evenly distributed in the research discourse. While some topics are meticulously investigated to yield insightful views on thought processes, others still need to advance further and some remain largely neglected. This chapter highlights those areas, which include: • established themes: growing research with helpful knowledge that informs the field • evolving themes: areas drawing researcher attention that should continue to do so • inactive themes: research with reiterated outcomes without much novel discovery • under-explored themes: existing research gaps that need to be addressed Allegorically, the impact of silence research on ELT practices remains relatively immature and can be conceptualised as an egg hungry for fertilising support to evolve (Figure 10.1), in which the part that needs the most support would be the under-explored themes. 10.1

Established Themes

Some areas in silence research that scholars have acquired extensive knowledge about include the following: • the dynamics of inner speech with investigations for over half a century, i.e. since the 1970s, thanks to which we recognise the dynamic of quiet reflection, intellectual engagement, and the diverse functions of the internal voice • linguistic, cultural, socio-psychological, and academic factors that influence learner withdrawal into or choice of silence • the wide spectrum of silences that allows educators to view silence with more openness • the socio-political use of silence and speech to consolidate power and exert oppression, which results in voice domination and marginalisation, low selfesteem and confidence, learning constraints, classroom hierarchy, and damage to social equity 175

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Figure 10.1 The distribution of research impact in silence studies

• the juxtaposition between teacher and learner views on silence that raises awareness of whom silence serves, how silence is under-used or over-used, why silence is misinterpreted, when silence becomes useful or useless, and how different attitudes towards silence are shaped • the understanding of productive silence (i.e. non-verbal ways of learning packed with intentional mental processing) that enables rehearsal of both linguistic and conceptual outputs, which helps repair the common misconception that learner silence is always negative These are only a few succinct mentions of what silence studies have achieved significantly to this day. References are not added to the above account as they have been employed extensively throughout the book when the topics arose, especially in Chapter 3 of this book. 10.2

Evolving Themes

10.2.1

Learner Absorption of Silence from Others

Peer influence, which can be either social conformity or resistance to social pressure, has been a fascinating area in silence research. It is observed that the learning environment plays a huge role in how students verbally express themselves or refrain from doing so. Many projects reveal the relationship between student decision to speak or keep silent, during classroom and online learning alike, and peer behaviour (Mattsson et al., 2008; Mico-Wentworth, 2014; Duran, 2020). For example, an articulate student may refrain from sharing ideas if no one else in the class shares theirs. Introverted students may feel inspired and participate when exposed to friendly teachers and peers and well-personalised learning content. Such dynamics, however, can be more complex as mutual interpretations can be an idiosyncratic process. Some topics

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to be investigated further include peer suppression of speech, peer interpretation of the silence of others, peer negotiation of learning behaviour, and mutual evaluation of contribution quality. 10.2.2

Crossing the Border between Silence and Speech

Depending on individual differences, both silence and speech can represent a comfort zone. The shift between silence and speech, besides inherent styles, may occur in response to changing individual needs or circumstantial factors. During the learning process, there are moments when learners struggle to consider whether they should hold back or share their views. Research has documented a range of factors that may influence such choice-making instants as relating to sociocultural climate, power dynamics (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995), topic familiarity, classroom vibe, and amusement during discussion (Hew et al., 2010; Tu & McIsaac, 2010), among other types of classroom developments. To shift from one mode to the other is not exactly a personal decision but represents a convoluted area that deserves further investigation. 10.2.3

The Invisible Learner

Learner invisibility may stem from the silencing of voice in educational settings. Researchers have documented the silence of oppression among students whose voice is not listened to, which makes them feel excluded or devalued (Long & Carless, 2010; Munk & Agergaard, 2018; Alerby & Brown, 2021). Many learners choose to remain invisible in the face of power confrontation by the dominant group that makes them subordinate. In the classroom, a teacher may unknowingly exercise unnecessary power through the lack of receptivity towards students’ attempts to contribute to the lesson. Such politics of silence within the classroom needs further investigation, especially in unpacking how intimidation is connected to pedagogy, behaviour, group culture, discussion content, resources, activities, emotions, mutual perception, situational interpretation, social relationship, learning styles, and classroom management. 10.2.4

The Development of Silence Quality in Individuals

Silence is a highly individual construct. Interviews by Bao (2014) with 100 students from various international backgrounds show that silence could mean any of the following: • incompetence (not knowing what to say) • high competence (not wanting to voice mundane opinions) • moderation and self-control (not wishing to talk much)

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• thinking and planning to share • thinking without intending to share • processing in two languages (formulating ideas in one language to be delivered in another) One usual limitation of silence research (including mine) is that silence is taken in a snapshot more often than it is documented as a whole journey showing how the use of silence might continue to evolve in adaptive ways. In other words, our analysis and findings are often drawn from the data that make sense at the point of collection. Scholars who complete their studies may not follow up on the same case to see if participants use silence differently over time. For example, someone who uses silence and cherishes it at the time of the interview might some years later change their behaviour and appreciate speech more or vice versa. For this reason, more investigations need to be conducted in longitudinal studies. Some ethnographic studies conducted by scholars such as Hirschauer (2006), Schultz (2010), Rogers (2011), and Turnbull (2021) trace the meaning of silence back through time to understand how silence responds to contexts. 10.2.5

Learner Experience with Silence and Loneliness

The loneliness of language learners due to unaccommodating elements in the academic environment that result in unhealthy silence is an interesting theme for research. Some topics of research along this theme are: • the loneliness of independent learning without the help of teachers and communication with peers (Marsh, 1997) • the loneliness of immigrant children in a new country, those who struggle to belong as they do not feel they are understood and do not get along with classmates (Kirova, 2001) • the loneliness of students who study abroad and who must cope with more than just their studies (Slagter & Pyper, 2019) Silence, from a psychological perspective, is strongly connected to loneliness (von Witzleben, 1958). Kobierzycki & Maj (2009) believe that the former is the appearance of and a way of coping with the latter. This is because, as von Witzleben (1958) elaborates, some people may keep quiet as they have nothing to say, feeling lacking in substance. Others keep quiet because they have too much to say, being filled with substance. While loneliness in the former case is often associated with frail and empty positions, the loneliness in the latter case can be a powerful and intense experience. In Hindu philosophy, silence is far from the absence of speech. Instead, silence (mauna, Sanskrit: मौनम्)) has a voice of its own as characterised by inner quietude, which is an opportunity to concentrate on the self rather than the loss of voice as perceived in many Western societies. Silence, in that sense, is a healthy practice of loneliness as

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a way of welcoming or tolerating it, which means that silence gives strength to the task. This understanding echoes Tillich’s (2000) view that loneliness can be positive as it represents one’s courage to take upon oneself the burden of not relying on other human beings. In other words, it requires a great deal of strength to deal with the lonely situation with integrative capacity. As much as self-selected silence demonstrates the powerful ability to control speech, self-selected loneliness demonstrates the powerful ability to manage the inner world and rediscover oneself. Along this line, Weiss (1973) describes loneliness as a natural response to certain situations rather than a form of weakness. The wholesome retreat into one’s silent, lonely space to take shelter from the occasionally unbearable commotion of social life or of formal education is an area that deserves research attention. In Lawn’s (2020) inspection, every human being lives in two contrastive worlds, a busy one and a lonely one. In the former, we socialise, strive for relationships, perform teamwork, are outgoing, follow routines with others, make efforts to fit in and get along with peers, run errands, hurry to complete tasks, and are bound up in collective duties. In the latter, we retreat to quiet moments, withdraw from speech, reflect on ourselves, listen to our thoughts, hear our voice, and be with ourselves. In the former, we look outward and try to be the same as or relevant to others. In the latter, we look inward and realise how dissimilar we are to people we know. 10.2.6

Research to Diagnose the Silent Period

This pre-verbal stage of language learning can be a highly controversial area because its character has been contradictorily defined as a time for discovery, suffering, negotiation, crisis, self-assertion, desirability, undesirability, evidence of learning, and evidence of failure to learn. Such conflicting views beg the question of whether the silent period truly exists. Many learners exhibit silence at the beginning of their language learning journey and then move away from that phase only to later return to it. Such presence and absence of the silent time in individuals suggest that the idea of silence cannot be entrapped within a period, but silence can pervade throughout the lifetime of every learner. A phenomenon that is easily confused with the silent period is selective mutism (World Health Organization, 1992) or elective mutism (Tramer, 1934), which is a condition in which one can freely communicate with some people but become particularly quiet towards others. When the teacher observes a silent student, it is impossible to tell whether the student is only silent in this class or silent everywhere else. The only visible symptom is that the student does not speak much, and the immediate reaction would be to frame it as the silent period, which may or may not be right. While the silent period refers to withdrawal from verbal communication in all L2 settings, selected mutism is about such

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withdrawal only in some settings. Because of this, for researchers to make sure that they are studying the silent period (rather than observing selective mutism and mistakenly calling it the silent period), there is the need to look beyond one single context to be able to diagnose it accurately. The impact of selective mutism and the silent period respectively on one’s social and linguistic longterm development has not been studied and it would be exciting to examine this. 10.2.7

Learner Recontextualisation of Silence

There needs to be more research on how silence is employed differently by the same learner in different contexts. The intentional use of silence plays a role in reshaping the culture of learning. According to Cortazzi and Jin (2002), cultures of learning are not static but subject to constant change. So is the nature of silence. Many scholars observe that students’ educational beliefs, values, and learning styles can become highly modifiable as their exposure to interaction with international cultures increases (Shi, 2006; Ryan & Louie, 2007; Zhao & Liu, 2008; Li, 2010). A case study by Morikawa (2013), for example, shows that Japanese students in Australia simply do not practise silence in the same way as they would in their classrooms in Japan. In Japan, they would employ silence for conveying social meaning to others while in Australia silence is used for themselves to practise more meta-cognitive skills. The reason why silence takes on an academic training purpose and stops being a social tool is that Australian peers might not understand what silence is being communicated. A second case by Bao (2014) discusses an Australian undergraduate student, Shane, who spent four years learning Korean in Australia but most of the time found himself practising inner speech. Upon moving to Korea and living there for a few months, his Korean started to develop rapidly and he left the country with surprising fluency in the language. Shane admitted that without the years spent experimenting with inner speech, he would have never remembered all the words to use them. This case demonstrates how the intense use of the inner voice can shape language proficiency. In a third case, a Korean student, Insuk, reflected on how she modified her learning style after she settled in an Australian university. Some of her concerns about social harmony and face-saving were replaced by a commitment to, in her words, ‘unlock’ her ‘verbal competence’ by joining discussion ‘without fear of being judged’ (Bao, 2020b, p. 30). In a word, modification of learning style is an area worth investigating further because findings from various case studies are often so diverse that they show no consistent formula regarding factors leading students to more talk or more silence.

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10.2.8

181

Child Silence As Agency

Research in early childhood education over the past three decades has focused extensively on listening to children’s voices through both speech and artefacts (see, for example, Clarke & Moss, 2011; Christensen & James, 2017). However, recent appeals have emerged for attending more to child silence (Nicholas & Lightbown, 2008; Lewis, 2010; Spyrou, 2016). Mazzei (2007), for example, argues that silence is a choice that represents child agency. This view has been supported by findings from a case study by Liu and Martino (2022) in the Australian early childhood education context. In this project, young L2 learners of Mandarin are seen to employ silence purposefully to process new vocabulary and to make choices such as resisting requests, expressing curiosity, confirming what they want, and accepting the food offered to them. In another case study by Martín-Bylund (2018) in an early childhood service in Sweden, a preschooler decided to not reply to the teacher when asked whether she liked the food on the table. The child was avoiding risks because if she said that she wanted some of the food, she may then have been asked to eat it; if she changed her mind, she might be criticised, which had happened on a previous occasion. Drawn from such scenarios, it is suggested by Greene and Hill (2005) that instead of seeing silence as a problem in children, it might be more helpful to see it as a problem in educators. While children silence represents the delay in reporting conscious encounters with the world, it is our denial of such silence that represents the inability to access and understand children’s experiences. Along this line, the recent discourse on silence and second language learning in the early years has documented the debate on whether silence is a stage in L2 acquisition or not (Roberts, 2014) in which the developmentally appropriate views of the silent period in SLA are being challenged (Bligh, 2014). The recurrence of silence in the child as agency, choice, and non-verbal communication is an area worth researching. Child silence and child voice in the first language is another worthwhile research area. Since meaning is not always coded in speech, there has been an appeal for rethinking the rush to hear voices from children. Scholars such as Mazzei (2007), Lewis (2010), and Spyrou (2016) recommend critically reflecting on the child’s silence through more documentation, interpretation, and response. It is argued that waiting to hear only voiced utterances risks losing the ability to hear meaningful non-verbal communication in children. In many cases, as Poland and Pederson (1998) put it, ‘what is not said may be as revealing as what is said, particularly since what is left out ordinarily exceeds what is put in’ (p. 293). According to an extensive literature review by Roberts (2014), research on the silent period in early childhood education remains ‘extremely limited’ in terms of ‘the number of studies’ and ‘the number of children included in them’ (pp. 32–3).

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10.2.9

Pedagogical Silence

Little is known of teacher silence. For example, we do not know how common it is for teachers to hold back from uttering flawed speech, whether teachers seek feedback on their articulation, how often they reflect on it, and how willing they are to improve it. It is often believed that teachers are paid to talk rather than to keep quiet. A teacher who does not speak constantly may be regarded as not performing their job sufficiently. Unfortunately, many teachers habitually fill time with random speech as they probe for ideas. Mediocre talking can impair student learning. If that happened too frequently, students would suffer from insignificant materials and would be confused rather than enlightened. Teachers’ verbal delivery must not be underestimated because students will receive, process, comprehend, internalise, and commit it to their learning system. It would not be ideal to plant untidy chatter in students’ brains. Teaching is like manoeuvring a vehicle whereby silence and speech are the two gears that help one respond to traffic situations. The road is the classroom where events keep evolving and circumstances change constantly. As much as holding to one gear alone would restrict driving, holding on to speaking all the time may restrict student learning. The absence of internal evaluative skills in teachers is likely to result in flawed lecturing. Indeed, scholars who examine teacher silence have expressed concerns about those who, without sufficient self-monitoring of speech, babble and produce low-quality speech that confuses students and wastes their valuable learning time (Walsh, 2002; Plakans, 2011). While many teachers are critical of students’ words, they are selfgenerous about words of their own. When students produce poor quality contributions, the teacher will hurry to stop them or improve them. However, when the teacher produces poor quality explanations of concepts, students will do nothing to end such a dilemma. Teacher authority is a dangerous game that might mislead teaching, as such power over students would protect one from potential criticism that students dare not state. Sometimes, students indicate in their end-of-semester feedback that their teacher is hard to understand, yet such constructive critique comes too late: the teacher has already caused damage and got away with it. I have seen university students trying to avoid certain teachers simply because the way they lecture seems wordy, over-complex, and painful. Pedagogical processing may occur during the lesson (monitoring delivery), before the lesson (informal planning), and after the lesson (reflective practice). Without such a voice, intuitiveness would be removed from pedagogical practice, causing teaching to become robotic and unresponsive. While moments of planning before and after the lesson are commonly documented, teacher processing during the lesson is not. Researchers have observed and documented several key characteristics of classroom talk. According to Edwards-Groves, Anstey, and Bull (2014), talk

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can be neurological (assisting cognitive development), psychological (guiding thoughts), socio-cultural (building relationships), political (sharing the right of self-expression), and communicative (supporting and negotiating meanings). It would be helpful and interesting to see whether and how teacher silence might perform similar functions. A study by Vassilopoulos and Konstantinidis (2012), for example, discovers that teacher silence is used for diverse purposes in the primary classroom such as to calm down children (psychological), invite reflection (cognitive), encourage emotional experiences (affective), deliver approval or disapproval (administrative), draw attention (communicative), and exercise authority (political). Another study by Bao (2014) on pedagogical self-talk among Filipino teachers reveals that some employ intensive inner speech to make sure that what they deliver to students is the best of what they can formulate. This means that the teachers respect students so much that they avoid thinking aloud randomly. These projects raise the awareness that teacher silence in the classroom is functional enough to not be overlooked in pedagogical inquiry. Such investigation would help design more effective teacher education courses that include systematic knowledge about teachers’ strategic silence to support learning. This research area is at a very early stage and needs more qualitative, analytical work. 10.3

Inactive Themes

Research themes are considered inactive when their results represent inertia and do not expand current knowledge. Without making new contributions to the field, they are like resting volcanoes without much lava reserve to erupt. Although more publications keep coming out on these topics, the result tends to linger around similar discussions without many novel findings. To evolve in new directions, research must demonstrate a new angle, supplementary elements, more in-depth analysis, or conceptual growth. Among those themes are silence as saving face, experiments that treat all silent learners as inferior, and a static inventory of silence. 10.3.1

Silence As Saving Face

An extended amount of research has traced silence among East Asians to the teaching of Confucius where, as many scholars expound, silence is treasured over speech. This idea of silence as being more important than speech, unfortunately, is often cited in isolation from all else that Confucius said. Scholarly re-reading of this ancient literature reveals that in Confucian philosophy, action must precede words, in the sense that not until after someone has performed work and acquired experience do they have some authority to talk about related topics (see, for example, Pan & Wen, 1993; Qiao & Min, 2009; Zhong & Hu,

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2004). Without sufficient action or experience to support words, one might wish to patiently listen before talking. Silence, therefore, refers to the act of refraining from unqualified speech and Confucius did not rank silence higher than words in a vacuum. Instead, speech must be replaced by speech appropriacy, not by silence. However, it is sometimes misbelieved that, in Confucian teaching, silence is the first choice and speech is the second choice during communication. Based on the above understanding, if someone speaks without evidence or experience and happens to sound inaccurate or untruthful, that person should be ashamed and the metaphor for such disgrace is ‘losing face’. However, to state that silence is a way to avoid losing face is to oversimplify complex realities. This is because silence alone cannot save face. Instead, face would be best saved through either well-validated speech or waiting to speak until one becomes qualified enough to. It is this waiting time that serves as the kind of silence to save face, not silence alone and not static silence without a future. Many studies on learner perception of silence, however, do not see it this way and have arrived at the finding that silence per se saves face without unpacking silence as a process of working towards reliable speech. The relationship between silence and face indeed contains more components and processes than the observation that silence among learners saves face. It is worth exploring the same phenomenon of face-saving in various communities and from various perspectives. Some examples include research by Jaworski and Stephens (1998), which reveals silence as a common way of saving face among people with impaired hearing; and research by Gilmore (1985), which highlights that saving face can be as much of a teacher issue as a student issue: many teachers experience losing face when their students keep silent during the lesson. Another study by Bao (2014) reports the case of a student who employs silence not to save her face but to save face for classmates. It is because every time this student speaks, it feels as if she were showing off her fluent English, which might make her peers feel inferior to her. These projects simply show that different angles on this topic are realistic and possible. 10.3.2

Experiments to Terminate All Kinds of Silence

Many experimental projects are designed on the foundation that all silent learners are inferior and need speech therapy. Fairly speaking, there is nothing wrong with helping less competent and intimidated students gather more courage to participate in classroom discussions if the teacher can identify who they are and if they are willing to receive help. However, some studies are designed with the presumption that all introverted students must change and that all silences are illegitimate behaviour. When such intervention takes place, some learners might feel lucky while others might feel humiliated. According to Jacobs and Chase (1992), negative emotions occur in students who realise

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that numerical merits reduce their genuine learning passion. Research has discovered that when verbalism is promoted over mental processing, some students develop resistance towards participation (Hodge & Nelson, 1991; Reinsch & Wambsganss, 1994; Boniecki & Moore, 2003; Sommer & Sommer, 2007; Foster et al., 2009). Arguably, taking thoughtful silence away from students, especially when it is their major strength in learning, violates academic freedom and damages social equity. Research that terminates silence from a pro-speech perspective is problematic as it skews the value of learning among some individuals. When teaching introverted learners how to be extroverted, we might help some to learn more effectively but, at the same time, we might unknowingly prejudice others. Suppose the picture is reversed whereby it is now pro-silence scholars who approach speech from a pro-silence perspective. Suppose the investigation begins not by understanding students’ verbal styles but by assuming sweepingly that all profuse speech is wrong. Imagine how students would feel if a researcher stepped into a classroom and announced: ‘I’m here to conduct a project to shut up talkative students. I hope you’ll collaborate.’ At that time, perhaps the classroom would look like a prison. Occasionally, we might need quirky research, which is sometimes employed in behavioural psychology, to raise new awareness and help people move away from the danger of staying within one biased perspective. One classic example of such research is Jane Elliott’s famous primary classroom experiment in 1968 in which Elliott told students that brown-eyed classmates are genetically inferior to their blue-eyed peers. Without telling her class that it was just an experiment, Elliott made that announcement in a serious tone and then began to treat blue-eyed students with more love and care than the rest. Brown-eyed students, of course, felt terrible. Through this, Elliott educated her students about the damaging effect of racial discrimination, a behaviour that seemed normal to many people at the time. 10.3.3

Giving an Inventory of Silence

Over recent decades, many research projects have undergone assiduous work to reinvent the wheel, that is, to list the same causes of silence over and over without much in-depth analysis. Both the findings and the arguments from such studies are not new. For example, the finding continues to list common reasons for learner silence such as inherent shyness, low confidence, making mistakes, losing face, cultural norms, linguistic struggle, self-image, high anxiety, and low motivation, among others. Based on this list, the argument states that learner silence does not mean passiveness but has its reasons. Although any of the above causes might contain the potential for more nuanced approaches to investigation, some studies do not report much more than well-known

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universal facts. Unless there is something novel in the interpretation, research in this direction does not bring progress but reiterates existing knowledge and keeps the field moving around a loop. 10.4

Under-Explored Themes

10.4.1

The Emergence of Inner Speech during Social Speech

During everyday communication, one might occasionally experience two conversations proceeding at the same time: an interpersonal exchange with others and an intrapersonal discussion with ourselves. It seems hard to separate these processes because we rely on our thoughts in responding to others (social negotiation) but we also rely on the words of others to mediate our thoughts (self-mediation). Researchers a hundred years ago already confirmed that the mind does not perform thinking independently, but it thinks within a functional system shaped by the person and the world (see, for example, Smith, 1922; Luria, 1973). Based on this awareness, the practice of inner speech has been extensively investigated by scholars such as Bugelski (1969), Sokolov (1972), Paivio (1979), Guerrero (1991), John-Steiner (1985a, 1985b), Frawley (1997), Winegar (1997), and Innocenti (2002). Tomlinson (1997, 2001b) through task design has developed inner-speech procedures to assist L2 development. In his research, inner speech can be connected to both visualisation in the mind and kinaesthetic imageries in the body to enhance cognitive facilities. Being a powerful tool for learning and participation, the inner voice can emerge before, after, or in parallel with speech communication. Processes such as thinking for speaking (Slobin, 1987) and thinking while speaking (McNeill, 2000) have been the subject of studies. However, while the former has yielded extensive literature (see, for example, Ennis, 1985; Sternberg, 1986; Facione, 1990), the latter has not. Our understanding of how inner speech occurs during public speech to support learning remains minimal. It is observed that many communicators employ mental processing both when they are silent and when they are not. When someone makes utterances such as ‘uhm’, ‘well’, and ‘let me see’, they are indeed practising speech and silence at the same time: speaking because others can hear their words but silent because they are not saying anything. The automatisation of thoughts could be so robust in the mind that, regardless of whether someone is conversing with others or not, that person is still capable of prolific thinking. Such a relationship between internal and external speech has hardly been explored. While thinking without words has been a subject of study (see Baars, 1988 and Bermúdez, 2007), thinking on top of words seldom draws research attention. The relationship between competence and types of inner speech (during silence or during speech) remains under-investigated. For example, we do not know if highly

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competent communicators think well when they are talking while less competent counterparts must stay quiet to think effectively. 10.4.2

Studying Silence in the Same Way As Studying Speech

One common misconception about silence is that it is the opposite of speech. Because of this, we tend to treat silence as a void to be filled or a problem to be solved, forgetting that it is a reality to be experienced and a resource to be employed. Suppose we begin to view silence with the same recognition and mindset as when we view speech, then our curiosity towards silence will be an open window that enables us to study silence with more fruitful outcomes. Researchers have analysed the dynamic of what is involved in communication scenarios, including who speaks, when, in what situation, and what for. This allows academia to build knowledge of the social roles and communication functions of talk. For instance, verbal interaction has been the target of studies during the performance of various educational tasks (Fourlas & Wray, 1990; Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002). Such studies, which follow approaches known as functional analysis, cognitive processing, and social processing, have unpacked the complexity of speech in socially shared processes. Along this line, SavilleTroike (1987, 1988) hypothesises that inner speech does have a social nature rather than only a reflective nature. Over the past decades, researchers in speech communication have proved that this hypothesis is true. They have learned that silence does express social meanings and performs very much the same range of communicative functions as speech (Bao, 2014). For this reason, silence and speech need to be investigated to find meaning in both. While the relationship between teacher talk and student talk has been thoroughly investigated (Csomay, 2007; Davies, 2011; Mulyati, 2013; Pujiastuti, 2013), the relationship between teacher silence and student silence, especially when talk is not necessary, is hardly researched at all. In many cases, talk is frequently perceived as exhibiting a collaborative nature while silence is often perceived as denoting a resistant stance. This biased view has seriously hindered silence research. To address this dilemma might require researchers to change mindsets and pursue inquiries such as: If teacher-initiated talk leads to learner response to such talk for learning, would teacher-initiated silence lead to learner utilisation of such silence for learning? If this seems possible, what kind of strategy is required for teacher silence to have as positive an impact on student learning? 10.4.3

Silence in Relation to Solitude

Silence and solitude can be intensely similar. I’ll provide three examples for this assertion. First, these two constructs both denote a subtle sense of connection beyond the self. From a religious perspective, solitude both helps keep one

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connected to God and allows God to do work in one’s life. In culture study, psychology, and education, silence can be a way of bonding with others in a community. Second, solitude and silence can be experienced when one is surrounded by people. Burger (1995), for example, argues that ‘people can maintain a sense of solitude in the presence of others’ (p. 86). The discourse in silence also widely acknowledges the occurrence of silence across various social settings where one can be silent when being with others. Third, both silence and solitude have been viewed as the catalyst of creativity. Solitude is defined by Galanaki (2005, p. 128) as the kind of ‘beneficial aloneness’ that helps boost creativity. Such innovative moments in the self happen very much in silence and without unnecessary socialisation. In this way, both silence (not talking) and solitude (not meeting people) can work productively in assisting one’s needs, which can be resting, thinking, writing, reading, learning, rebooting energy, reflecting on experiences, or creating ideas. It is through silence and solitude that one may maximise the constructive use of time. Despite these similarities, the two constructs can be opposites. For instance, solitude can signify refraining from social communication, that is, ‘choosing not to interact with people around’ (Burger, 1995, p. 86), while silence can be employed ‘as a tacit form of communication in social processes’ (Eastmond & Selimovic, 2012, p. 502). It is extremely rare for academics to encounter two constructs that are simultaneously identical and conflicting. This suggests a highly complex relationship whereby silence and solitude can stay together as intimate friends or they can move away from each other as distant strangers. Such a relationship is intriguing enough to become a joint field of study. Both themes have evolved tremendously into new theories and thought-provoking publications. Historically, scholars who investigate solitude and scholars who examine silence have seldom had the opportunity to converse with each other and collaborate in research. 10.4.4

Healthy Solitude in Language Learning

Although language education has been widely acknowledged as a social activity, there are individuals, in my observation, who have experienced a major part of their learning journey in self-chosen aloneness. In many education theories, learning relates to teaching as two sides of the same coin (see, for example, Tharp, 1991; Lier, 1998; Firth & Wagner, 2007). However, learning a language by oneself without the help of a teacher and productively achieving proficiency is an under-explored area. Having explored the role of pedagogy in language acquisition, what the discourse has hardly examined is learner self-agency in the absence of teaching. While it seems impossible to study a new language while entirely detached from a speech community, there can be times when

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withdrawal from interaction allows the essential space for L2 intake to happen. The duality between socially embedded learning and autonomous, lonely learning is important to consider (Atkinson, 2002). Solitude does not have to be understood as being physically isolated without humans around. Someone who does not go to a school or a class to learn a language but ventures out by themselves to rehearse language use (being surrounded by people) can be regarded as a solitary learner. An example of this would be a Japanese person who comes to Australia and stays for one year to upgrade their verbal proficiency (without being on a language course and without any learning peer). Anecdotes of this type are reported in multiple case studies by Bao (2019) about lonely and independent individual English learners in Melbourne who break away from formal education as a way of being themselves in their learning styles. 10.4.5

Silence and Speech As Environments for Thinking

Different people think best in different environments that may be either quiet or filled with voices. The role of silence versus speech in supporting thinking processes is a complex area that deserves more research attention. Silence can be linguistic or non-linguistic. According to Vygotsky (1939), non-word thought is possible. Sometimes, we think without language first and then employ language to articulate that idea. Language in that case is only the ‘phonetic clothing’ that is put on pre-existing concepts (Levinson, 2003). A specific term for such concepts is ‘mentalese’ (Pinker, 1992), which refers to thoughts that are more cognitive than linguistic. Egocentric speech, inner speech, and social speech are the processes of turning thought into words so that it can be shared. Speech is the vehicle that allows one’s idea to be known by others since non-word thoughts cannot be transmitted. Although to understand someone’s thoughts we must hear their words, words are not always necessary in the act of building thoughts. This observation, however, does not apply to everyone alike as people are simply different. I inspected Vygotsky’s theory by asking my students if they think in words, images, or abstract notions. Their answers gave me all these possibilities. During the discussion, I also raised the question, ‘Do you think more through talk or in silence?’ One-third of the class replied that thinking must happen in silence: they cannot think if they are not quiet and if others are not quiet for them. Some said that thinking can happen without silence: they think well through their talk and the talk of others. Some felt that the manner of thinking depends on cognition: how they think will depend on the challenge of the matter, in the sense that the more cognitively demanding an issue is, the more silence is required. The rest recalled that their thinking needs to be triggered by the talk of others and that listening stimulates thoughts.

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For me, this brief discussion is a research project itself. I learned from my students that both silence and speech can either support or impede thinking in different ways as a matter of individual differences. Raising this awareness is important because it encourages every teacher to consider diverse conditions for learners to exercise thinking optimally. After all, not all learners would benefit from the same supportive environment in the same way. Sometimes, what the teacher assumes to be a source of support might turn out to deter learning. This awareness should inspire scholars to continue investigating the environment that supports thinking for language development. Research by McCarthy (1931, 1946, 1960), for example, reveals that children who develop language in an adult-speech environment tend to produce more extended talk than those who grow linguistically among peers of similar ages. Although this theme is not a new area of research, today’s changing educational landscape (with the increase in social applications, digital resources, and blended learning) should not stop stimulating novel research endeavours. According to Bloom and Keil (2001), researchers might need to distinguish between tasks that are language-dependent (which encourage inner speech) and those that are language-free (which encourage mental representation). Their hypothesis states that the latter has more potential to produce more interesting performance than the former. This idea, however, needs to be investigated through empirical attempts and the meaning of interesting performance must be defined as part of a research design. The potential contribution of research to this theme would be recommended strategies for teachers to help learners discover their way of employing silence for output. As important as the practice of developing persuasive arguments in words, the rehearsal of thinking in different tasks, under various conditions, and with multiple types of support might unlock tremendous possibilities for the intellectual mind. 10.4.6

Comparing Silence and Exploratory Talk

Classroom talk comprises exploratory talk and presentational talk (Barnes, 1976). The former might resemble mental processing in that such talk (or thought) is not ready to be heard as it may be characterised by broken logic, incomplete utterances, and frequent errors. Exploratory talk is exercised as a way of attempting to comprehend issues and probing for ideas. By nature, this type of speech is very much the same as inner speech, almost as if there were a device connected to the thinking brain that made everyone’s thoughts audible to everyone else. Imagine a classroom where the sound of mental processing is out loud audible. Presentational talk, in the meanwhile, is the satisfactory sequel of exploratory talk. It is the outcome of information processing and ideas formulation to the point where a more complete and accurate speech is now ready to be

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delivered to an audience. While exploratory talk assists internal sense-making, presentational talk helps the learning of others. To some extent, thoughtful, silent students care more about mutual learning and so they refrain from troubling others with their untidy thinking process, while highly verbal students would not mind letting others hear all their internal struggles. Suppose scholars would like to conduct a research study to compare silent students’ thoughts with verbal students’ exploratory talk. While the former group would constantly write down what they think for the researcher to collect as data, the latter group’s talk would be recorded as data. The two sets of data then could be analysed and compared in terms of characteristics and qualities. However, this experimental design could be flawed considering the possibility that the two groups may be different in their intellectuality and thus their thinking or talking quality could make their performance different rather than the mode of processing (i.e. thinking silently versus talking loudly). Then perhaps the experiment should involve only one group of students who perform differently at two different times. I do not have a sound solution for such a complex research topic but would like to raise this scenario for more dialogue. This topic can be highly complex because learners often do not think or talk independently but also listen to others at the same time. Such listening may constantly affect the quality of thinking and the quality of exploratory talking. 10.4.7

Critical Silent Incidents during Task Performance

Despite my research on silence in tasks presented in Chapter 9 of this book, there remain issues in this area to be investigated further as far as case studies are concerned. While my projects look at learners as a community, other researchers might wish to examine the dynamics of how individuals handle tasks. Some worthwhile questions to ask could be: Have you ever encountered a challenging concept and desperately wish that the lecturer paused for you to process information? Have you ever needed a break to think? In what kind of task? Describe a task that you remember in which some quiet thinking time was needed otherwise you could not have performed it. During task performance, who do you listen to? Teacher, peer, or yourself? When do you listen to each? Do you vary in the way you listen and how? Does the silence or talk of others interfere with your learning efficiency? One example of a critical scenario is reported by Bao (2014) in which a student internalises learning disruption coming from a classmate who speaks frequently but rarely listens to others. As a result, this person’s contribution is confusing and disconnected from the discussion topic. Along the line of helping silent learners speak, there should also be research that helps verbal learners become more vocally self-controlled. This line of inquiry is important because, arguably, different learners in the same classroom may vary in the amount of silent time they need for cognitive

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engagement and in the way they use that silent space. The current literature is yet to offer adequate knowledge about what kind of learners with what kind of learning styles would need how much time, when, and for what kind of task. Besides, the nature of silence in various tasks might not be the same and scholars cannot simply assume that learners employ silence ‘to think’ since that action naming might not represent accurately what learners precisely do when coping with different tasks. Depending on the demand of every activity or every step of an activity, one may employ silence to feel, rest, judge, understand, form an opinion, look for words, and so on. All these functional nuances of silence are not the same and thus they cannot simply be grouped under ‘to think’. 10.4.8

Silence in Learner-Centredness

It might be helpful to research silence in relation to teacher perception of learner-centredness. A great deal of literature has connected ways of learning with this construct. McCombs and Whisler (1997, p. 9), for instance, argue that the meaning of learner-centredness is connected to how well scholars and educators understand individual learners and the best available knowledge about how their learning occurs. Rogers (1969), one of the major theorists in humanistic psychology, highlights several features of learning in which ‘selfreliance’ (p. 163) should be encouraged. Between the 1960s and 1990s, since we did not have empirically based knowledge about how learners process L2 data through silence, our ‘best available knowledge about learning’ (McCombs & Whisler, 1997, p. 9) and ‘self-reliance’ in learning (Rogers, 1969, p. 163) did not contain silent learning. Since the 2000s, our understanding of the learning process has embraced the silent mode of learning in it. This should prompt scholars to consider the reality that to acknowledge the productive role of silent learning is to make the meaning of learner-centredness more complete. According to Lou and Restall (2020), learnercentredness needs to facilitate learners’ real abilities, including both speaking and thinking. Besides, being able to self-select how to learn will reflect the true meaning of student-centredness as advocated by Edwards (2001, p. 37), which emphasises that students should be ‘able to learn what is relevant for them in ways that are appropriate’ rather than be forced to speak out at any cost because the teacher believes they should. That would be considered oppression rather than studentcentredness. 10.4.9

Studying Silence As Equity

In political inquiry for social justice, the use of silence has widely been recognised as a tool of oppression. Such investigation is helpful because silencing, in numerous cases, is a tyrannical apparatus that inhibits people

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from being themselves and stops their voices from being heard. Despite this picture, in education, communication, and well-being studies, speaking out loud may not be the most desirable behaviour in all situations. Instead, there are circumstances where one wishes to be purposefully quiet to produce the best of themselves, such as to yield new energy, synergism, thoughts, understanding, attention, internal dialogue, and internal control. Accidentally forcing someone to abandon the inner voice when it is fruitfully employed for meaning-making is to suppress that voice and forbid it from generating new ideas. Treating everyone the same by making them speak all the time may lead to unequal results because some need to speak more to survive discrimination while others wish to reduce the unwanted word to resist clamour. Concrete examples of such needs are emptying a mind overloaded with dispensable thoughts, mental processing of cognitively challenging ideas, non-verbal condolences when mundane routine words seem obtrusive, and so on. Social justice, by definition, is the fair distribution of individual choices and resources so that everyone can legitimately be what they want to be without invading the rights of others. Some discourse in the politics of education, however, has confined the meaning of equity solely to speech by suggesting that it is superior to silence and that it works best in all settings. Unfortunately, forcing people to be silent or speak when they are not ready would amount to an act of oppression and cause damage to equity. Considering this awareness, it might be useful to design ethnographic studies to investigate how speech and silence represent personal choices in context rather than persistently treating one as progressive and the other as backwards. 10.5

Connecting Silence Research with the Teaching Profession

The recommended areas of research in this chapter derive from three methods. One is through critical reading into the current discourse of silence studies in education. Two is through my understanding of how various concepts (e.g. equity, task, learner-centredness, solitude and loneliness, etc.) can be combined with silence to build creative association in research. Three is through connecting silence with the everyday life of teachers. By reflecting on the teaching practices of myself and my colleagues, I am aware of how teachers struggle with learner silence and how they feel. For example, several friends of mine who are English teachers in Japan told me that they have developed a unique form of depression after many years teaching in classes where most students do not verbally communicate. For these teachers, delivering monologues on a day-to-day basis (i.e. speaking to students without being responded to) can be a highly stressful experience that troubles their everyday mood, making them emotionally exhausted even

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when they are not teaching. Some teachers choose to repair such loneliness of low communication by developing verbal Japanese skills and using Japanese instead of English throughout every lesson. While these teachers feel better with this policy, others who hold on to English mention continuing to suffer from constant stress. One of my colleagues recently thought of researching the social-affective dimension of international teachers of English in Japan by connecting teacher well-being with student silence. This is one vivid example of how creative imagination in research is inspired by real-life experiences. Silence research, after all, must benefit learners, practitioners, materials writers, and teacher development programmes. It must make education easier, more effective, and more productive. As much as students can help each other improve classroom interaction (as mentioned in Chapter 3), teachers can also help each other improve their well-being through shared experience, mutual advice, and collaborative research effort. Addressing learner silence is not just about making speech happen at any cost, which would be too narrow an endeavour, but is also about bringing more positive values into the educational setting to improve teacher happiness, learner satisfaction, social equity, and pedagogical efficiency. 10.6

Concluding Insights

What this chapter has recommended is only a light sketch of what needs to be further explored. Our knowledge in this field still contains many blind spots waiting to be uncovered. The Journal of Silence Studies in Education, for example, has listed eighty different topics for silence research and indeed there should be more than that. Silence is a complex academic, linguistic, sociocultural, psychological, political, and communicative system ‘whose understanding requires the sophistication of a fine-grained interdisciplinary analysis’ (Jaworski & Stephens, 1998, p. 65). It is ‘a place where the researcher goes out to find more, but unlike speech, it is not always as identifiable, tangible or observable’ (Spyrou, 2016, p. 4). Scholars have continually appealed for the need to move beyond audible speech and listen more to the inarticulate rather than leaving non-voice data outside of qualitative research (see, for example, Mazzei, 2007; Lewis, 2010). This book, despite intensive efforts to illuminate several issues, has not uncovered enough about what silence means and the field continues to be relatively open. Silence, like speech, is situated practice. Silence would be best studied in its environment rather than being isolatedly examined within a person. It is the constantly changing environment that activates how someone’s silence is being exercised and what it means. Because of this, silence will not make any sense unless we look at both ends of the silent process to see where it comes from and

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how it finishes: there is a trigger and there is an outcome. Sometimes, the outcome may be nothing (no learning value) but it is the trigger that has caused it to be that way. Although English language pedagogy is the main context of the silence theme in this work, it is hard to separate this discipline from the broader groundwork of education. This is because there are elements of practice that seem unique to language teaching but there are also more common elements across all kinds of teaching. Language use is intimately connected to content, culture, and society; the substance of all these cannot be separated from many discussions. This book has created an open-ended conversation rather than offering any conclusive truth. While the origin of silence studies dates to nineteenth-century psychology and philosophy, silence research has developed most intensively over the past two decades. With many empirical angles remaining untouched and under-explored, silence needs more to be written about it.

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Index

Please note: page numbers in bold type indicate figures or tables. absence of speech, treatment of silence as, 5 activity-involvement consciousness, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 addressing classroom silence developmental support, 100 dimensions of support, 98–103 meta-cognitive support, 100 emotional support, 102 humanistic system, 97 individualised support, 102 linguistic support, 99 preparative system, 97–8 resourceful support, 101 rewarding system, 96 silence as a struggle with oneself, 89–90 with the past, 90–2 with the present, 92–6 social and cultural support, 101 affective awareness, benefits of silence for, 48 affective disengagement, social disengagement vs, 121 alienation, feelings of, learner struggle with silence and, 94 anthropology, evolution of silence as theme in literature of, 5 anxiety alleviating role of silence for, 157 concentration of research on, 125 learners’ sources of, 41 role of in learner silence, 74, 92 silence as demonstration of, 29 appropriacy, 141 articulatory rehearsal mechanism, 6, 26 Asia confronting digital boredom, 114 family upbringing, 91 see also East Asian cultures attention control, benefits of silence for, 48 attentional processing

as positive way of capturing silence, 10 relationship with useful silence, 58 attentive listening, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 Australia case study on children’s employment of silence in L2 learning, 181 cultural acceptability of silence, comparison with Japan, 24, 80–1, 180 lengths of early silence study, 50 ‘participation sticks’ experiment, 42 student case study on engagement and progress, 125 student survey on silent learning, 123 students’ feelings around communication with teachers and peers, 113, 119 teachers survey on student engagement, 120 authenticity in language teaching, history of research into, 4 Bao, D., 18, 26, 45, 47–8, 58, 63, 69, 83, 90–1, 95, 98, 142, 149, 151, 171, 173, 177, 180, 183, 184, 189, 191 ‘better to remain silent than to risk appearing foolish’, 14 Boniecki, K.A., 42, 50 Buddhist countries, silence training in, 54 The Cambridge English Course (1984), 158 Canada school teachers’ views on learner silence, 46 study on Chinese students’ participation in class, 84 study on classroom relationships of international students, 41 study on peer influence on behaviour, 119 study on peer-facilitated discussion groups, 135 capturing silence negative ways of, 10–11

242

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index neutral ways of, 11 positive ways of, 10 ‘the cause of silence’, quest for, 39–44 children’s silence, research into, 51, 181 China, 145–8, 167 classroom activities proposed model, 68–71 silence training as, 68–9 classroom experiments, two types of, 44 classroom participation, learner struggle with silence and, 94 classroom practice of productive silence, documenting, 48 classroom processes, challenging exclusion of silence from, 47 classroom silence role of seating arrangements, 41 see also addressing classroom silence classroom talk, as ‘the speech of educated people’, 7 cognitive activity, as neutral way of capturing silence, 11 cognitive development, benefits of silence for, 48 cognitive involvement, verbal participation and, 16 communication ‘better to remain silent than to risk appearing foolish’, 14 changing nature of in the digital age, 9 consideration of misperceived silence in, 7 culture-specific styles, 75 evolution of silence as theme in literature of, 5 improving through verbal self-regulation, 54 role of silence in, 12 silence as impediment to facility of, 10 studies on the function of silence in, 6 communication apprehension, as negative way of capturing silence, 75 communication avoidance, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 communication breakdown, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 Communication Strategies (Paul), 145, 159 competence, silence as lack of, 28–9 complex assortment of voices, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 complexity of silence, 11 comprehensible output, 141 computer-mediated communication benefits and challenges of, 127–8 see also online silence conflict avoidance, 75 as negative way of capturing silence, 10

243 Confucian culture, restraining nature, 75 Confucius, and the treasuring of silence, 183, 184 conscious processing as positive way of capturing silence, 10 relationship with useful silence, 58 consciousness in SLA, history of research into, 4 contemplative pedagogy, 12 contemplative silence, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 context, dependence of silence on for its interpretation, see also silence in context, 75 control and resistance, silence as form of in classroom settings, 29 conversational initiation, lack of, 12 counter-silence interventions, research into, 41–4 creativity, benefits of silence for, 48 crescendos of speech, and research in L2 acquisition, 24 cultural acceptability of silence, comparison of Australia and Japan, 24, 80–1, 180 cultural capital, concept of, 75 cultural immobility, as reason for learner silence, 75–7 cultural mobility, concept and research, 76 cultural upbringing, impact on perception of silence, 13–14 defining silence, challenge of, 8–11 delay in speech, silence as a, 27–8 dichotomy of silence, 9 Dickinson, Emily, 53 digital boredom, as trigger for online silence, 113–15 disability, perception of silence as, 3 diverse roles of silence, 5–8 history of awareness, 5 Dulay, H., 12 Duran, L., 108, 119, 121, 123, 134 Duty/Shame (Giri/Haji) (TV series), 13 East Asian cultures Confucian influence, 183, 184 employment of silence as engagement, 48 learning in isolation and, 120 ‘participation sticks’ experiment, 42 turn-taking behaviour, 91 value of silence, 13, 39 education, mismatch in the internalisation of silence and speech in, 13–14 education research, early requests for silence to enter, 2

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

244

Index

Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), see also ERIC database, 1 educational literature, coverage of ‘silence’ in, 1 elective mutism, 179 eloquent silence, 9 ELT task design, see task design embracing silence in pedagogy, 55–6 emotional development, benefits of silence for, 48 emotional expressions, history of research into, 4 Empower Advanced (Doff et al.), 145, 159 English File (Latham-Koenig, Oxenden & Lambert), 145, 155, 158, 173 English [for Vietnamese] (MOET), 145, 158–9 equitable silence, research into, 192–3 equity in education, concept of, 115 ERIC database search of keyword ‘silence’, 2 evaluative silence, 9 exclusion of silence from pedagogy, in research, 3 experimental speech, use of among students, 26 exploratory speech, 84 research into, 190–1 expressive intention, 141 external speech, dependence on inner speech, 140 failure of language, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 Family and Friends (Thompson), 145, 159–60 family upbringing, learner struggle with silence and, 91–2 fear of incompetence, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 fear of misinterpretation, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 fear of mistakes, 75 feelings of alienation, learner struggle with silence and, 94 feelings of invisibility, learner struggle with silence and, 90 Filipino students responses to tasks, 149–51 use of silence, 150, 152 Filipino teachers, pedagogical self-talk, 183 foundation of learning, silence as, 1, 7, 10, 12 functions of silence examples of, 9 mental rehearsal towards L2 output, 9 Gardner, R. C., 41 Garrison, D. R., 124, 138

ghosts, silence as reminder of the human effort to visualise, 16 Guerrero, M. C. M. de, 9, 34, 37, 38, 59, 64, 186 Harumi, S., 46, 48, 56, 81 Hrastinski, S., 108–9 humiliation, silence as a shield for avoidance of, 29 humility and avoidance of conflict, learner struggle with silence and, 90 ideational silence, 9 idle ignorance, silence as state of, 10 ‘If I were’ (Bao), 167 impediment to communication facility, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 implicit expression, vs explicit speech, 10 inadequate ability in self-expression, as negative way of capturing silence, 10 Indonesia, 144, 145, 149–50, 152 Indonesian students, responses to tasks, 149–51 inner formulation system, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 inner speech dependence of external speech on, 140 effectiveness for maximising the brain’s potential, 62 emergence in language learning as self-talk, 34 guiding the practice of, 62–3 as ‘instrument of thought’, 38 positive value for foreign language learning, 64 practising, 64 relationship with useful silence, 59 research, 64 dynamics of inner speech, 36–8 emergence of during social speech, 186–7 some functions of, 38 value for language proficiency, 180, 186 see also self-talk inner verbalisation, silence as output in the form of, 26 inner voice as positive way of capturing silence, 10 relationship with useful silence, 59 self-regulatory nature, 29 input processing, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 instructional silence, 9 instructor immediacy, and learner willingness to participate, 12 intentional practice of silence, as pedagogy, 48 interaction, silence as a process of, 7 interaction hypothesis, 31, 141, 142

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index interaction modelling, role of, 7 interactional competence, required elements, 28 interactionism, concept of, 23 interactive silence, concept of, 6 intercultural communication, dynamics of frustration with silence in, 7 interior language, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 internal output, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 internalisation concept of, 29 of silence and speech, mismatch, 13 of speech patterns, 6, 26 internalised speech, relationship with useful silence, 59 international students classroom relationships study, 41 competence in written electronic media, 109 learner responses to tasks, 148–9, 152 meaning of silence for, 177 perception of excessive talk from classmates, 47 responses to tasks, 148–9 interpersonal silence, 9 intrapersonal silence, 9 introverts, ways of learning, 90 inventory of silence, 185–6 invisibility, feelings of, learner struggle with silence and, 90 Israel, 129 Japan, 24, 48, 132, 145, 148 cultural perception of silence, 19, 77, 80 comparison with Australia, 24, 80–1, 180 employment of silence in the classroom, comparison with Australia, 180 English teachers’ experiences, 193–4 Jaworski, A., 2, 10, 12–13, 28, 34, 44, 47, 49, 58, 64, 92, 184, 194, 214, 232 Johannesen, R. L., 6 John-Steiner, V., 27, 34, 37, 186 The Journal of Silence Studies in Education, 194 Kalman, Y. M., 112 Karas, M., 39, 84 Kasper, G., 31 King, J., 43–5, 80, 97 Korea, 132, 145–8, 180 Krashen, S., 12 Kyrios, Nick, 13 L,2 learning, silence in as a delay in speech, 27–8

245 as a mediating tool, 29–30 as a psychological defence, 29 children’s employment of silence, 181 as lack of competence, 28–9 as natural process, 17 as private speech, 27 the silent period, 17–20 SLA literature, attitudes toward silence in, 20–4, 31–2 SLA research attitudes toward silence in, 24–30 current gaps, 30–1 as speech, 26–7 as thought, 25–6 variation in discourse, reasons for, 31–2 lack of competence, silence as, 28–9 lack of motivation, as reason for learner silence, 85 lack of response, as reason for learner silence, 82–3 language as ‘phonetic clothing’, 189 relationship with silence, 14 language development apparent lack of concern about the use of silence in, 55 place of output rehearsal in, 59 language learners, research into loneliness of, 178–9 language learning, relationship of solitude and, 188–9 language proficiency, value of inner speech for, 180 language teacher identity, history of research into, 4 Lantolf, J. P., 30 latency in student response and participation, as trigger for online silence, 112–13 learner agency, and productive silence, 48 learner behaviour, modifiability of, 8 learner invisibility, research into, 177 learner recontextualisation, research into, 180 learner self-interaction, elements of, 123–4 learner silence cause-and-effect relationship between teacher silence and, 138–9 concept of, 6 dimensions of, 40 iceberg of, 45 Krashen’s hypothesis, 12 problematic, see problematic silence learner strategies for productive silence, 63–8 learner struggle with silence boredom, 93 dimensions of, 89

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246

Index

learner struggle with silence (cont.) family upbringing, 91–2 feelings of alienation, 94 feelings of invisibility, 90 humility and avoidance of conflict, 90 introverted nature, 90 lack of teacher support, 92 limited fluency, self-perceived, 89 low self-esteem, 90 perception-behaviour mismatch, 94–5 speed of verbal participation, 92 teacher-learner mismatch, 95–6 thinking time, 93 turn-taking culture, 91 uncertainty about classroom participation, 94 unpreparedness, 93 learner-centredness, research into, 192 learners, views on silence, research into, 44–7 learning role of silence in, 1, 7, 10, 12 social and psychological functions, 92 teacher’s role in how learners employ silence in, 7 learning motivation, history of research into, 3 learning space allocating fairly, 57–8 treating silence as a, 59 learning style, value of modification, 180 Levelt, W., 31 linguistic noticing, 141 listening, producing output from, 67–8 Littlewood, W., 93 low comprehension, as negative way of capturing silence, 12 low language proficiency, as negative way of capturing silence, 10, 75 MacIntyre, P.D., 41 MacKinnon, D., 2 McEnroe, John, 13 McGough, Roger, 166 meaning of silence, diverse perspectives on, 8–11 mediating tool, silence as, 29–30 mental activity, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 mental processes, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 mental rehearsal benefits for language learning, 38 characteristics of silence in, 9 concept of, 59 and enhancement of motor performance, 30 following up on the outcome of, 63

as positive way of capturing silence, 10 potential to evolve into self-talk, 62 RADAR model, 69–71 relationship with useful silence, 59 supportive conditions, 60 teacher’s role, 61 understanding the learning value of, 62–3 value of, 30 mental space, importance of for student learning, 55–6 ‘mentalese’, 189 meta-silence, 65 Mico-Wentworth, J.M., 111, 121 mind wandering concept of, 79 as reason for learner silence, 79 misjudgment, silence as subject to, 77–8 mnemonic silence, 9 moderated talk, requirements, 60 Mongolia, 145–8 motor performance, enhancing role of mental rehearsal, 30 multicultural contexts, reinterpretation of silent behaviour in, 7 mutism, selective/elective, 179 Nakane, I., 81, 90 natural process, silence as, 17 necessary but absent silence, 83–5 negative feedback, influence on learner silence, 41 negative perceptions of silence in education, 4–5 negative silence, conceptualising without prejudice, 74–5 non-verbal communication during the silent period, 50 history of research into, 4 non-verbal cues, absence of as trigger for online silence, 111–12 nursery rhymes, 18 off-task silence, as negative way of capturing silence, 11 Ollin, R., 46, 65 online learning challenges and rise of, 105–6, 129–30 impact of the coronavirus pandemic, 105 online silence as a natural part of the learning process, 108 benefits and challenges of computermediated communication, 127–8 challenges and rise of online learning, 105–6, 129–30

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index comparison of painful and helpful silence, 117 comparison of productive and unproductive silence, 108–9 concept of, 106–7 dimensions of online learning experiences and, 116 directions of, 116–17 helpful affective engagement, 125–6 cognitive engagement, 122–3 comparison with painful silence, 117 social engagement, 123–5 technological engagement, 126–7 as neutral way of capturing silence, 11 painful affective disengagement, 120–1 cognitive disengagement, 118–19 comparison with helpful silence, 117 coping strategies, 131–8 clear participation protocols, 133–4 collaboration with non-teaching staff, 137 interesting and useful learning content, 131–2 personalised communication, 132–3 scaffolding, 134 shared responsibilities, 135 social meaning in teacher presence, 137–8 student choice, 135–6 student voice, 136 student workload and participation, mediation of, 134 variation in approaches to tasks, 136 social disengagement, 119–20 technological disengagement, 121–2 scholarly attitudes towards, 107–10 triggering conditions, 110–16 absence of non-verbal cues, 111–12 challenge to social equity, 115–16 digital boredom, 113–15 latency in student response and participation, 112–13 pressure on teachers, 113 types of, 118 on-task silence, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 out of context silence, see also silence in context, 80–1 output rehearsal place of in language development, 59 see also mental rehearsal participation anxiety, cultural context, 84 ‘participation sticks’ experiment, 42

247 pause between speaking turns, potential for misinterpretation, 78 pedagogical silence, research into, 182–3 pedagogy embracing silence in, 55–6 research suggestions, 7 shift between silence and speech as fundamental skill in, 53 silence-inclusive, see silence-inclusive pedagogy peer influence, research into, 176 peer relationships, in educational settings, 58 peer-interactive tasks, 31, 141 perception-behaviour mismatch, learner struggle with silence and, 94–5 performative behaviour, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 personalised communication, as coping strategy for online silence, 132–3 Philippines, see also Filipino students; Filipino teachers, 144, 145, 149–51, 152 phonological rehearsal of words, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 Piaget, J., 27, 68 Picard, M., 14, 58 Plato, 36 poor listening skills, 75 as negative way of capturing silence, 10 poor pedagogy, silence as resistance to, 81–2 poor socialisation, role in learner refrain from verbal interaction in the classroom, 41 positive emotions, potential benefits for learning, 125–6 positive learning environment, shaping factors, 60 power imbalance in classroom relationships, 41 role in learner refrain from verbal interaction in the classroom, 41 premature linguistic ability, compensating for, 48 pressure on teachers, as trigger for online silence, 113 private speech examples of, 27 practising and absence of the silent period, 18 self-regulatory nature, 29 as self-talk, 27 silence as, 27 problematic silence, 75, 86 cultural immobility argument, 75–7 examining the reasons for silence, 74 lack of motivation argument, 85

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248

Index

problematic silence (cont.) lack of response argument, 82–3 mind wandering argument, 79 misjudgment, silence as subject to, 77–8 necessary but absent silence, 83–5 negative silence, conceptualising without prejudice, 74–5 out of context silence, 80–1 see also silence in context poor pedagogy, silence as resistance to, 81–2 recommendations for improving silence, 86 productive silence concept of, 58 conditions for, 60 providing, 60–1 documenting classroom practice, 48 inner speech, practising, 64 interaction with resources, 64–5 learner agency and, 48 learner strategies, 63–8 listening, producing output from, 67–8 managing shared learning space, 57–8 mental rehearsal following up on the outcome of, 63 understanding the learning value of, 62–3 model for productive-silence activities, 69 multiple functions of, 59 nurturing the functions of, 58–9 principles of, 57–63 the productive silence wheel, 57 related constructs, 58 reporting on, 68 research into, 47–9 research requests, 7 scripted speech, employing, 65 tasks for investigating, 47 visualisation inspired by a text, 66–7 pro-silence community, view of silence, 12 pro-silence stance, researchers’ advocation for, 48 pro-talk community, view of silence, 11–12 pseudo-language, 11 ‘psychic ear’, 37 psycholinguistics evolution of silence as theme in literature of, 5 role of in the birth of SLA, 24 psychological defence, silence as, 29 Pushpak Vimana (Krasinski), 170 A Quiet Place (Krasinski), 170 RADAR model of mental rehearsal, 69–71 Rea-Dickins, P., 128 receiver apprehension, 75

as negative way of capturing silence, 10 recommendations for improving silence, 86 for teacher development programs, 71–2 reflecting practice, benefits of, 54 relationship of silence with pedagogy, 2–3 resources, interaction with, 64–5 reticence, as negative way of capturing silence, 11 retreat into privacy, as neutral way of capturing silence, 11 Richards, J. C., 159 Ridgway, A. J., 26, 56, 140 Robinson, P., 30 Rogers, R., 178, 192 roleplay, semi-scripted, 65 Russia, 48–9 Saville-Troike, M., 18, 26, 50, 75, 187 saving face through silence, 183–4 scaffolding, as coping strategy for online silence, 134 Schultz, K., 178 scripted speech, employing, 65 seating arrangements, role in classroom silence, 41 second language acquisition presence of silence in, see L2 learning, silence in see also SLA literature, SLA research selective mutism, 179 self-compassion, benefits of silence for, 48 self-directed learning, research into, 127 self-discovery process, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 self-esteem, learner struggle with silence and, 90 self-perception of fluency, learner struggle with silence, limited fluency and, 89 self-talk concept of, 67 consideration in task design, 153 emergence of inner speech in foreign language learning contexts as, 34 experimental speech and, 27 introspective, relationship with useful silence, 59 learner self-interaction and, 123 pedagogical, Filipino teachers, 183 potential for mental rehearsal to evolve into, 62 private speech as, 27 research into, 64 testing the value of an utterance, 29 see also inner speech

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index semiotic silence, 9 shyness, 75 as negative way of capturing silence, 10 silence benefits for learning, 48, 123, 140 challenge of defining, 8–11 equitable, 192–3 inseparability from speech, 8–9 inventory of, 185–6 as open construct, 74 privileging of speech over, 11–12 relationship with speech, 58 research into shift between speech and, 177 saving face through, 183–4 terminating all kinds of, 184–5 understanding the association between speech and, 53–5 silence as a learning paradigm, history of research into, 4 silence as speech, 26–7 silence as thought, 25–6 silence in context, 13–14 ‘better to remain silent than to risk appearing foolish’, 14 example demonstrating the relevance of, 13 and identifying silence, 16 silence in education the debate, 11–13 distribution of in educational literature, 1 early appeals for, 5–8 history of research into, 4 negative perceptions, 4–5 as planned component in task design, 140 see also task design silence quality, research into development of, 177–8 silence research academic dimension, 41 blind spots waiting to be uncovered, 194–5 ‘the cause of silence’, quest for, 39–44 characteristics, 51 children’s early silence, 51, 181 classroom practice of productive silence, documenting, 48 comparison with other forms of ELT research, 3–4 concept of, 33 connecting with teachers, 193–4 contributions to education, 49–50 counter-silence interventions, 41–4 cultural dimension, 40 development of, 3–5 distinctive trends, 34–6 distribution of impact, 176 evolution of, 34

249 exclusion of silence from classroom processes, challenging, 47 history of, 34 into the dynamics of inner speech, 36–8 learner and teacher views on silence, 44–7 limitations, 49 linguistic dimension, 39–40 productive silence, 47–9 pro-silence stance, advocating for, 48 socio-psychological dimension, 41 suggestions for investigating into specific areas of pedagogy, 7 on the silent period, 50–1 themes established, 175–6 evolving, 176–83 children’s silence as agency, 181 development of silence quality, 177–8 diagnosing the silent period, 179 learner invisibility, 177 learner recontextualisation, 180 loneliness of language learners, 178–9 pedagogical silence, 182–3 peer influence, 176 shift between silence and speech, 177 inactive, 183–6 inventory of silence, 185–6 saving face through silence, 183–4 terminating all kinds of silence, 184–5 underexplored, 186–93 emergence of inner speech during social speech, 186–7 equitable silence, 192–3 exploratory talk, 190–1 learner-centredness, 192 relationship of solitude and language learning, 188–9 relationship of solitude and silence, 187–8 silence in task performance, 191–2 studying silence in the same way as studying speech, 187 thinking environments, 189–90 silence training in Buddhist countries, 54 as classroom activity, 68–9 silence-inclusive pedagogy, 1, 3, 14, 16, 58 benefits of, 72–3 ultimate ambition, 14 ‘silent encounter with the world’, as neutral way of capturing silence, 11 silent experiences, range of meanings decoded in, 7 silent learners, responsibility to justify intentions of silence, 78

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250

Index

silent period absence, 18 debate around, 16 development of an L2 inner voice during, 26 diagnosing the, 179 evolution into speech, 18 Krashen’s hypothesis, 12 in L2 learning, 17–20 as neutral way of capturing silence, 11 non-verbal communication during, 50 persistence, 18 recurring, 18–20 research on, 50–1 teachers’ allocation of for students to assimilate learning materials, 48 ‘silent proverbs’, 9 silent reflection, number of publications on, 1 silent speech, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 SLA literature, attitudes toward silence in, 20–4, 31–2 SLA research attitudes toward silence in, 24–30 current gaps, 30–1 movement to shift focus to positive emotions, 125 social behaviour, benefits of silence for, 48 social competence, elements, 31 social disengagement vs affective disengagement, 121 online silence as, 119–20 social engagement, types of, 124–5 social equity, challenge to as trigger for online silence, 115–16 social identity, transformation of, 76 social justice, 192–3 social media, 9, 159 social speech, research into emergence of inner speech during, 186–7 social withdrawal, 83, 90 as negative way of capturing silence, 10 sociocultural silence, concept of, 6 socio-psychological dimension of silence, research on, 41 Sokolov, A.N., 34, 37, 186 solitude relationship with language learning, 188–9 relationship with silence, 187–8 Solutions (Falla & Davies), 145, 158, 160 Speak Now (Richards & Bohlke), 145, 159 speech continuum of thought and, 37 inseparability of silence from, 8–9

privileging of over silence, 11–12 relationship of silence with, 58 research into shift between silence and, 177 silence as, 26–7 studying silence in the same way as studying, 187 understanding the association between silence and, 53–5 speech patterns, internalisation of, 6, 26 stress in students, benefits of reducing, 61 struggle of learners with silence, see learner struggle with silence learning through, 17 student participation, relationship with cooperation, 60 student response and participation, latency in as trigger for online silence, 112–13 subvocal articulation, 6, 26 as positive way of capturing silence, 10 symbolic rhetoric, as positive way of capturing silence, 10 task design coursebook titles examined, 145 explanatory/analytical tasks and creative/ problem-solving tasks, 149 inclusion of silence as a planned component, 140 learner responses to tasks academic pressure and, 152 amounts of silent thinking, 152 case studies, 143–4 comparative exploration, 151–5 exposure to English and, 151–2 fluency tasks, 152 individual interests and, 153–5 Indonesian and Filipino students, 149–51 international students in Australia, 148–9 personality and, 153 promotion of verbalism in theories relating to, 141 relationship between silence and, 140–3 research question, 143 task types, 143, 145–8 cognitive tasks, 156 common task types in language learning, 146–7 comparison of cognitive and fluency work, 155–7 distribution evaluation, 144, 155–73 fluency tasks, 156 ‘If I was’ template, 167 tasks for creative silence, 160–73

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019460.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index characteristics of recommended activities, 161 composing poems, 161–3 dramatisation, 164 drawing pictures, 167–8 reading silence in movie scenes, 169–71 soundwalking, 171–3 visualisation, 165–6 writing lyrics, 163–4 tasks involving both silence and speech, 149, 160 tasks requiring more silence than speech, 148–9, 157–8 tasks requiring more speech than silence, 149, 158–60 task-type pyramid, 154 task performance, silence in, research into, 191–2 teacher development programs, recommendations for, 71–2 teacher fairness, benefits for students, 60 teacher guidance, benefits for student learning, 61 teacher inspiration, value for mental rehearsal, 60 teacher silence, cause-and-effect relationship between learner silence and, 138–9 teacher support, lack of, learner struggle with silence and, 92 teacher-learner communication, task design and, 141 teacher-learner mismatch, learner struggle with silence and, 95–6 teachers practice of silence, 7 pressure on as trigger for online silence, 113 role in learners’ employment of silence, 7 role of teacher behaviour in peer ecology, 58 sensitivity towards students’ feelings and needs, 92 views on silence, research into, 44–7 technological disengagement, online silence resulting from, 121–2 terminating all kinds of silence, 184–5 textual silence, 9 Thailand, role of silence training, 54 ‘They came from the sea’ (Tomlinson), 165 thinking environments, research into, 189–90 thinking space, opening up through teaching methods, 61

251 thinking time, learner struggle with silence and, 93 Thomas, N.J.T., 90 thought continuum of speech and, 37 as kind of speech, 36 silence as, 25–6 Tomlinson, B., 26, 37, 38, 48, 59, 64, 66, 164, 165, 166, 186 Tom’s Diner (Vega), 164 Total Physical Response (TPR), 164 Turnbull, J., 41, 178 turn-taking, 91 cultural context, 91 role of in communication and teaching, 53 teacher management, 7 and the free flow of communication, 79 United Kingdom (UK) impact of academic boredom on students, 114 value of learner silence, 46 verbal participation research, 126 United States, 41 cross-cultural communication in, 81 unpreparedness, learner struggle with silence and, 93 useful silence, functions of, 58–9 utterances, monitoring and testing the value of, 29 Vega, Suzanne, 164 verbal participation cognitive challenge of as influence on learner silence, 41 comparison with cognitive involvement, 16 motivational strategies, 42 relationship with learning engagement, 126 silence as struggle with speed of, 92 supporting, 99 verbal self-regulation improving communication through, 54 by teachers, value of, 54–5 Vygotsky’s theory, 53 ‘verbal thinking’, silence as, 26 vicarious communication, 123 vicarious participation, 56, 127 ‘Vinegar’ (McGough), 166 visual imaging, concept of, 66 visualisation benefits of, 66 example of, 67

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252

Index

visualisation (cont.) exercise, 66–7 Vygotsky, L., 26–7, 30, 38, 53, 153, 189

Winegar, L., 186 withdrawal behaviour, 75 as negative way of capturing silence, 10

waiting time between speaking turns, cultural interpretations, 81 Wilkinson, L., 153 Wimbledon Tennis Championship, 13

Yashima, T., 43 Zatoichi Challenged (Misumi), 170 Zembylas, M., 14, 72, 112

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