by call or letter. So generally it is conceptualized against the state of speaking andregarded as the absence of talk or communication.In linguistics, silence involves all the nonverbal forms, while in a narrow sense, silenceis a part of paralanguage. Scholars have many kinds of definitions and classifications forsilence from different perspectives. Before carrying out the detailed discussion of classroomsilence, it is very essential to know about the previous studies on silence.Over the past 45 years, the concept of “reticence” has undergone a great evolution. Theterm “reticent” was initially coined by Phillips (1965, cited in McDowell, 2000) to mean thatthere are people who have difficulty in communicating across a range of situations. And hedefined reticence as “personality-based, anxiety disorder.” Burgoon (1976) labeled reticencein an individual as “unwillingness to communicate” which is based on some personality traitsas introversion, low self-esteem and alienation.
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2.2 Major Perspectives of Silence
To deeply understand and analyze the contributing factors of students’ silence, researchin many interdisciplinary fields must be considered. In the following, previous studiesconducted from psychological, pragmatic and socio-cultural scopes will be presented. Silence from the psychological perspective mainly refers to the intermittent behavioramong the teacher and students when they transmit the mental languages, which reflects theirmental process during that time (Liu, 2005). Wardhangh (1986) also pointed out, silence couldmean what people are feeling right now, what people are thinking about, or theirpsychological condition as comfort, respect, support, deep thought, hesitation or evenrejection.Dennis Kurzon (1995, cited in Zhang, 2011) put forward a basic distinction between thetwo types of silence — unintentional and intentional. Unintentional silence is usuallypsychological in nature which occurs due to personal inhibitions of the addressee preventedfrom speaking. However, intentional silence is modal in structure for that the addresseeattempts intentionally not to be collaborative with the addresser. Both intentional andunintentional silence can be explained by using a modal. Intentional silence is noted with theform “I may / will / must not speak,” whereas unintentional silence, psychological in naturemay be “I cannot speak” (Kurzon, 1995:58).Another scholar Gurevich (1989) in the field of social psychology, distinguished thepsychological presence and non-presence of the silent person. He thinks of silence as a way ofopening up distance in conversation. In short, both the addresser and addressee claim theirpresence by engaging verbally, but if the addressee keeps silent showing the non-presence, thedistance between the participants opens up, meanwhile this implies that the silent person isnot physically absent, but is withdrawing from the interaction by silence. Obviously, this isalso reflected in classroom situations. If a student sits in the back who does not participate inthe class interaction, or may not answer the teacher’s questions, she / he does not want to beregarded part of the interaction (Kurzon, 2007:16).
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3. Research Design ...... 13
3.1 Research Questions........13
3.2 Subjects ........13
3.3 Instruments.........14
3.3.1 Classroom Observation ......14
3.3.2 Questionnaire .........15
3.3.3 Interviews .........15
3.4 Data Collection and Analysis.....17
4. Results and Discussion ....... 19
4.1 Differences of LiberalArts and Science Majors’Silence in EFL C
