Investigating Silence in Online EFL Classes Among University Students in China during COVID-19 pandemic

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2114613/v1

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Investigating Silence in Online EFL Classes Among University Students in China during COVID-19 pandemic

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2114613/v1

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The COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers and students in some Chinese universities to adapt to online classes—a new norm in pedagogical transformation in teaching and learning in the context of big data. We made a case study of students’ silence in the online EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes at Hunan Institute of Technology to uncover the cause of silence and shed some light on enhancing interactive communication to improve online EFL teaching and learning efficiency. The study analyzed the interactive data obtained from the teaching platform. Questionnaires were distributed to one hundred and two English major students and semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixteen teachers. The results showed that students’ silence was common in online EFL classes. Both the students and teachers cited four similar perceptions for the cause of silence, namely, student-related factors, teacher-related factors, online-related factors, and cultural factors. The student-related factors and online-related factors respectively were cited as key contributing factors to the silence. The study is significant in pedagogical implications as it provides some sharing on best practices for online teaching and learning for undergraduates.

COVID-19 pandemic

EFL

interaction

online classes

students’ silence

teaching and learning

The use and development of digital technology have ushered in a technological revolution in the world of education (Li, 2022). As a new norm in pedagogical transformation in teaching and learning, the online class has caused growing attention and has been widely applied to cross-campus and cross-region course teaching. The debate on synchronous online teaching and learning has become a global concern also. Since the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all walks of life and transformed the whole education industry. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a catalyst for educational institutions to make online learning their primary option (Gupta, 2021; Prasetyanto, Rizki & Sunitiyoso, 2022). The pandemic situation in China worsened in 2022, which forced the Chinese Ministry of education to send out directives again to suspend face-to-face classes and actively carry out online teaching and learning in some pandemic-stricken regions. Teachers were directed to mobilize available online course platforms and on-campus e-learning spaces to ensure continuity during the control period.

Online teaching and learning are not confined to traditional classrooms, and even bedrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms, or bathrooms could be “classrooms”. Apart from transforming classroom environmental conditions, online classes also change the way of interaction between students and teachers: more diversified online teaching methods and internet technology are used in teaching and learning. Problems such as network platform congestion, insufficient resources, and insufficient teacher-student interaction are inevitable, and there are numerous challenges faced in online classroom teaching (Gupta, 2021). One of the biggest problems and challenges that posed confusion and anxiety for many teachers is the students’ silence which is often known as insufficient teacher-student interactive communication. According to a study carried out by Lv et al. (2021) at Chongqing Institute of Science and Technology in China, the majority of students kept silent in many online courses and the average scores of the active students were higher than that of the silent students. This evoked the debate about students’ silence and also emerged as an alarming concern (Cheung, 2021).

Classroom interactions are believed to be the main ingredients of qualitative teaching and learning outcomes (Xhaferi, 2021). However, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way of teaching from onsite to online (Xhaferi, 2021), causing classroom interactions to be less controlled. Online classes may remain a teaching mode in many countries due to the widespread pandemic. There is an urgent need to address the problem of students’ silence in online classes as it affects the academic performance of students, especially the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students whose communicative competence is considered to be essential for second language learning. Therefore, our research aimed to uncover the cause of silence in online EFL classes among students at Hunan Institute of Technology and shed some light on enhancing online EFL teaching and learning efficiency. It revolved around the following three questions: 1) Was the students’ silence also a common phenomenon in online EFL classes among the Chinese students in this study? 2) What were the factors that contributed to the students’ silence in online EFL classes? 3) What possible methods can the teachers utilize to enhance teaching and learning effectively? We collected data from teaching platforms, conducted questionnaires for students, and carried out semi-structured interviews with teachers to conduct the research.

The authors contend that exploring the reasons underlying online EFL classroom silence is significant and imperative in today’s increasingly prosperous and indispensable online education. This study is significant in assisting educators to understand students’ silence in online classes and the cause of it. Its results may provide insightful sharing on online pedagogical implications for the teachers to increase the students’ classroom interactions (also known as interactive communication) and performance in online classes.

Definitions of ‘silence’ vary greatly, depending on the theoretical frameworks and methodologies adopted for its study (Jaworski & Sachdev, 1998). According to Bosacki (2005), silence is the absence of vocalization. As for students’ silence in the classroom, Granger associated it with disobedience, misbehavior, conflict, and even deception (Patterson, 2005). Medaille and Usinger (2019) pointed out that students’ silence is a psychological state and behavior of students, characterized by an unwillingness to speak up to participate in teaching activities. In a specific context, Hanh (2020) asserted that students’ silence happens when the teachers pose questions and there is no reply from students, or they are reluctant to express their ideas when the teacher calls for discussion or debate. In almost all educational settings especially in the EFL context, students’ verbal behavior has attracted more favorable attention than their silence (Hu, 2021).

As technology is constantly reshaping language education and redefining the interaction between teachers and students, students can also have non-verbal responses, apart from verbal responses, to interact with teachers in classes through the online function of ‘literal chatting’. Zhou (2021) insisted that students’ silence in the context of an online class should be defined as no verbal nor literal responses from students when teachers initiate an interaction. Therefore, based on definitions given by previous scholars, students’ silence in online classes in this paper, will be defined as students’ negative behavior characterized by making neither vocal nor literal responses to interactions initiated by teachers.

Many researchers have conducted studies on students’ silence, especially students’ silence in the EFL classroom. Some researchers have noted that Asian students’ silence is a very common problem faced by foreign language teachers (Cortazzi & Jin, 1996; Tsui, 1996; Shao & Gao, 2016). Mo (2019) claimed silence is a nightmare rather than gold in an EFL class. A study by Harumi (2011) that investigated Japanese EFL learners’ classroom silence in a Japanese EFL context supported this claim. Her study shows that the existence of silence in EFL contexts can be a source of conflict between students and teachers and even among students themselves, and it can hamper students’ acquisition of the target language. In recent years, students’ silence in EFL classrooms continues to attract the attention of many researchers. For example, Juniati (2018) conducted a study to explore the reasons for the students’ silence in the EFL speaking class and how the lecturer could overcome the students’ silence in the EFL class. Similarly, Hanh (2020) investigated the reasons behind English-major students’ in-class silence and put forward several solutions for a more effective in-class conversation. Humphries et al. (2020) investigated silence in Japanese classrooms in the Japanese cultural context and looked into the activities as well as factors that have an impact on students’ capacities to speak English. Studies on students’ silence have also caught the interest of Chinese researchers. For instance, Wang (2020) and Chen (2020) explored students’ silence in college English classes. Though insightful, these studies are conducted in traditional face-to-face classroom settings.

As for online classes during COVID‑19 pandemic, since education is moving towards educational technologies for student learning to avoid strain during the pandemic season (Bridge, 2020), and many institutes opt for online classes (Shehzadi, et al., 2020), more studies have been carried out to focus on the impact of environmental factors on academic performance of university students taking online classes during the pandemic. Researchers such as Realyvásquez-Vargas et al. (2020), Kang and Kim (2021), Sarkar et al. (2021), and Beyari (2022) analyzed the students’ perception of online classes during the pandemic. While Chatta, Haque, and Rao (2022) investigated the faculty’s perception of online classes. A study by Gupta (2021) focused on the impact of the pandemic on classroom teaching. Xhaferi (2021) explored students’ interaction activities used in online classes at a university in North Macedonia during the pandemic and Zhou, (2020) contributed to the class design and strategy of online English classes during the pandemic.

However, up to date, few studies have explored students’ silence in online classes during the pandemic, particularly in the Chinese context. Zhou (2021) explored why a group of postgraduate students kept silent in their online classes, and he found that reasons could be classified into three categories: the peculiarity of online classes, the uniqueness of postgraduate academic lessons, and other general reasons resembling the ones in the traditional classroom. Lv et al. (2021), likewise, reported a case study on classroom interaction and the “silence” behavior of students in some online classes during the pandemic. The literature, however, shows that none of the studies has examithe Chinese university students’ silence in online EFL classes during the pandemic. Therefore, the present study attempts to fill this research gap.

3.1 Participants

The population for this study consists of 102 English majors and 16 teachers who taught EFL courses to the English majors at Hunan Institute of Technology. We held online meetings for students and teachers respectively to inform them about the concept of students’ silence as well as the study objective and ensure that their participation in the research was voluntary. Pseudonyms were used to ensure the confidentiality of all participants. The 102 English majors including 44 sophomores and 58 juniors participated in the questionnaire survey. We encouraged the 16 teachers to provide their course data on classroom interactions. Subsequently, they were invited to participate in online semi-structured interviews on their perception of the cause of silence and their responses to it. And students were required to complete online questionnaires about their perception of the cause of silence.

3.2 Study procedure

The first step was to make an inquiry into the situation of the phenomenon of students’ silence in online EFL classes by mining data on classroom interactions from online teaching platforms. This was followed by student questionnaires to investigate the phenomenon and its cause from the students’ perspective. Semi-structured interviews with the teachers were meant to investigate the causes of students’ silence from the teachers’ perspective and probe into teachers’ responses to it. Countermeasures were suggested in the last step upon the analysis of the data, in which some proposals for enhancement of students’ participation in online EFL classrooms were suggested, based on the previous study results and analysis.

3.3 Data Collecting

To ensure the validity of the study, data from three sources, namely, statistics from online teaching platforms, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, were collected. Thanks to digital and information technology in the era of big data, the data on online classroom interactions were mined from online teaching platforms and both questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted online. SPSS 25 was applied to analyze quantitative and qualitative data.

3.3.1 Statistics from Online Teaching Platform

The realization of classroom interactions in online classes was generally achieved through online teaching platforms based on third-party software, and the software data retention and recording functions enable data on teaching to be tracked and recorded in real time. In the spring semester of 2022, there were 16 English courses for English majors at Hunan Institute of Technology: 5 courses for juniors, 6 for sophomores, and 5 for freshmen. Teachers generally used online platforms such as “Rain Classroom”, “Dingding”, “Wechat Group” and “QQ Group”. For instance, the two courses, English Reading and English-Chinese Translation (hereinafter referred to as “course A” and “Course B”) used Dingding to conduct live teaching for 44 sophomores and 58 juniors respectively. The online classroom interactions were generally based on the teachers’ instructions or group messages on topics through online teaching platforms, and the students either made vocal responses through microphones connected to online classrooms or responded through bullet chats. Among the 16 courses, the data in Course A and Course B were selected at random as our research samples of online class interactions. The following data were collected from the platform to analyze students’ silence (Table 1).

Table 1

Design for analysis of data collected from online teaching platform
Course information		Data on students’ responses to interactions
Course name	Total number of interactions in the course	Total number of responses in the class
Total class hours	Number of interactions per class hour	Number of responses per interaction
Number of students		Number of responses per student
		Distribution of responses among students
Note: students’ response refers to both vocal response and literal response

3.3.2 Questionnaires for students

The questionnaire consisted of two parts: part 1 was designed to ascertain whether students’ silence in online EFL classes was a common phenomenon and part 2 aimed to explore the cause of it. Part 1 consisted of 2 single-choice questions and Part 2 which included four multiple-choice questions was designed on four dimensions, namely, student-related factors, teacher-related factors, online-related factors, and cultural factors, to explore students’ silence in online EFL classes (Table 2). The student-related factors included interest, lack of self-control, language incompetence, lack of confidence, and so on. Teacher-related factors included the style of teaching, speaking speed, teacher-student relationships, and so on. Online-related factors focused on unstable signals, unfamiliarity with the operation of software, inability to adapt to online teaching, improper classroom environment which was different from the face-to-face classroom at the university, and so on. Cultural factors mainly referred to the contributing factors related to cultural tradition such as viewing making a mistake in class as losing face.

Table 2

Components of the questionnaire
Questions	The rationale for the design
Q1-Q2		The phenomenon of students’ silence in EFL online class
Q3		Student-related factors related to silence
Q4		Teachers’ factors related to silence
Q5		Online environmental condition factors related to silence
Q6		Cultural factors related to silence

3.3.3 Semi-structured interviews with teachers

Semi-structured interviews based on the model provided by Merriam & Tisdell (2015) were carried out online with the 16 teachers of online courses for English majors. The 16 teachers are numbered as T1, T2, T3, T4…T16. The interview consisted of the following questions (Table 3):

Table 3

Questions for semi-structured interviews with teachers
Items		Questions
Q1	Face-to-face traditional class and online class, which do you prefer? And why? Please explain.
Q2	Do you interact with the students during an online synchronous class?
Q3	Did you teach the same class students in the previous term or terms? If yes, please compare to the previous term or terms of face-to-face traditional classes, are the students more active or inactive in participating in classroom interactions in online classes?
Q4	Did you teach the same courses in the previous term or terms? If did, compared to the previous students in your face-to-face classes, are the students in your present online classes more active or inactive in participating in classroom interactions?
Q5	Compared to traditional face-to-face classes, are students in online classes generally more active in participating in classroom interactions?
Q6	How many students can respond to classroom interactions?
Q7	Are most responses to classroom interactions made voluntarily or only when students are nominated by teachers?
Q8	If the students are silent, what factors do you think contribute to students’ silence?
Q9	How do you feel and how do you adjust your teaching strategy when silence occurs?

4.1 The common phenomenon of students’ silence in the online EFL classes

The analysis of data from the three sources shows students’ silence in EFL classes was a common phenomenon.

Statistics collected from online teaching platforms have proved there was a large group of “silent” students in EFL classes (Table 4 and Fig. 1). Table 4 demonstrates the descriptive statistics on interactions.

Table 4: Descriptive statistics on interactions

Course

name

Class hours

The number of students

The number of interactions

initiated by teachers

The number of responses from students

Course A

906

Course B

1152

The analysis of Table 4 shows that the teacher of Course A issued 92 teaching interactive instructions within 48 class hours during the semester, with an average of 1.92 interactive instructions per class hour, while the students made 906 responses, with an average of 20.59 responses per student, 0.43 per class for a student, and 9.85 per interactive instruction. The corresponding figures for Course B are 96, 1.71, 1152, 19.86, 0.35, and 12 respectively. In both courses, the figures for the students’ responses are low, which indicates students were very inactive in participating in interactions.

Based on the statistics from the teaching platform, a graph was also drawn to show the frequency and distribution of students’ interactions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 shows the imbalance of students’ responses for both courses. Based on the figure and calculation, the following alarming findings are got: In Course A, about 70.41% (31) students have fewer responses than per capita (20.59), 56.79% (25) less than 10 responses, 34.07% (15) less than 5 responses, and 18.16% (8) no response; The corresponding data of Course B were 67.26% (39), 58.64% (34), 32.77% (19) and 17.25% (10) respectively. To conclude, the above statistics show the “silent” behavior in the classroom. That is, a minority of students contributed to most of the class interactions while a majority of students kept silent.

The findings of the questionnaire given by the students also confirmed the phenomenon of students’ silence (Table 5).

Table 5: Result from questionnaires on the phenomenon of students’ silence

Questions	Replies	Percentage
Q1 Is the class atmosphere in your online English class dull?	Yes	60.78%
	No	39.22%
Q2 How often do you participate in classroom interactions in online English classes?	Often	14.71%
	Average	26.47%
	Seldom	41.17%
	Never	17.65%

The result of the questionnaire shows that 60.78% of the participants in the questionnaire thought the atmosphere in their online English class was dull, 41.17% admitted that they seldom participated in classroom interactions during an online English class, 17.65% confessed that they never participated at all and only 14.71% said they were active participants.

The phenomenon of students’ silence has been reconfirmed by the semi-structured interviews with teachers: 7 out of the 9 teachers who had taught the same class in the previous term or terms thought the students were more silent than in a face-to-face class; 9 out of the 13 who previously taught the same course said the students in their online class were more silent than the previous onsite-class students they had taught; 11 out of the 16 who participated in the interview pointed out students in the online classes were more silent than those in onsite classes; 12 admitted that most responses to classroom interactions were made only when students were nominated by teachers and a few active students contributed to most voluntary responses.

4.2 Factors contributing to students’ silence

We investigated the factors contributing to students’ silence using two ways: questionnaires for students and semi-structured interviews with teachers. Q3 to Q6 in the questionnaire for students aim to get students’ explanations of the contributory cause of silence (Table 6). It should be noted the participants were allowed to give multiple answers or no answers to a certain question. Some participants did not provide any answers to questions related to particular factors such as teacher-related factors and cultural factors on the ground that they did not consider these factors accounted for students’ silence.

Table 6: Students’ explanation of the cause of their silence

Factors of different dimensions	Percentage
Student-related factors
lack of interest in the course	19.61%
language incompetence	58.82%
lack of confidence	27.45%
nervousness or shyness	21.56%
not sure about or not knowing the answer	15.68%
lack of motivation	9.80%
lack of time to think and answer	4.90%
Teacher-related factors
inability in online teaching	29.41%
being unable to make students understand	14.71%
giving either too difficult or easy topics	4.90%
poor teacher-student relationship	1.96%
not giving enough chances, time, or turns for students to respond	19.80%
Online-related factors
unstable signal	6.86%
not having a smartphone or computer to have online classes	0%
unfamiliarity with the operation of the teaching platform	4.90%
the boredom of the online class	38.24%
not being accustomed to online class	20.58%
distractions at the site where students have online classes	19.60%
being unable to concentrate when using a smartphone or computer to have class	39.21%
Cultural factors
being afraid of losing face	17.65%
not want to be understood as showing off	1.96%

Q8 in teachers’ interviews is an open-ended question to gauge the teachers’ perception of the cause of students’ silence (Table 7).

Table 7: Teachers’ perception of the cause of students’ silence

Factors of different dimensions	Percentage
Student-related factors
language incompetence	50.00%
lack of confidence	18.75%
nervousness or shyness	31.25%
Teacher-related factors
teachers’ inexperience in conducting online classes	18.75%
very limited time for students to think because of limited class time	6.25%
limited chances for students to take turns because of limited class time	31.25%
Online-related factors
unstable signal	6.25%
students are not accustomed to online class	18.75%
distractions at the site where students have online classes	18.75%
students are unable to concentrate with smartphones or computers used for class	43.75%
lack of face-to-face supervision of students in online classes	37.50%
Cultural factors
Students’ fear of losing face	12．50%

The results indicate both students’ and teachers’ interpretations of silence fall into similar categories and the top 5 factors accounting for silence are language incompetence, being unable to concentrate with smartphones or computers in class, distractions at the site where students take their online classes, the boredom of the online class, and lack of face-to-face supervision by teachers in the online class. The result also shows that both teachers and students think language incompetence in students mainly accounts for students’ silence and online-related factors are the second most important reason.

Based on the research results, the following two insights are observed. Firstly, classroom silence in online classes has a strong correlation with online-related factors, which makes the situation in online classes worse than in traditional face-to-face classes. The “general reasons”, namely, student-related factors, teachers’ factors, and cultural factors contribute significantly to students’ silence, which coincides with what has been found in previous research on traditional face-to-face classroom silence (Harumi, 2011; Humphries, Burns & Tanaka, 2015; Yu, 2016; Hanh, 2020; Chen, 2020). It suggests that in both online and face-to-face classrooms, the three essential components always play a role in classroom silence. However, online classes pose additional online-related problems and subsequently impact students’ capability to participate in class interaction.

One of the challenging features that attribute further to silence is the availability to switch off the video in an online class. The negative impact exerted by this feature of online classes is that students would be easily distracted from classes for various reasons. These arguments concurred with the study by Zhou (2020). As shown in Table 6, a total of 19.6% of students admitted distractions at the site where they had online classes were partly responsible for their silence and 39.21% of students thought that they were unable to concentrate with smartphones or computers to take online classes. This was also confirmed by several teachers in the teachers’ semi-interview. According to three teachers (T7, T8, and T13), the distractions included noise at the site where they had online classes. The feedback also showed that there was a temptation to play computer or mobile phone games (claimed by T1, T3, T8, and T15) and multitask with other things (reported by T2, T9, and T14) which were more appealing to students but less relevant to classroom tasks. In the interview, 2 teachers (T6 and T10) even mentioned they often heard noises from TV, people chatting, animated games, food consumption and even snoring when some students forgot to turn off their microphones. Being free from showing face in front of teachers in online classes to a great extent, made students free to choose where they had class and how they attended the class. The place they chose to have class varied from home, park, street, or supermarket to some other places, and even if they had class at home they could choose to take it in the sitting room, dining room, bedroom, or even bathroom. They could be walking, eating, sleeping, chatting, playing games, watching TV, etc. while taking online classes. In that case, silence is possibly an indication that students are not listening or learning in class but engaged in other activities. In a way, the face-hiding feature of online classes deteriorates the silencing phenomenon by making the students lack self-control and possibly take the chance to escape from teachers’ face-to-face supervision.

The quality of online classes depends not only on the curriculum teaching design, classroom teaching organization, teachers’ online teaching ability, students’ good self-discipline, and teachers’ strict supervision but also on the teaching platforms and network technology guarantee. As shown in Table 6, 29.41% of students expressed their dissatisfaction with teachers’ online teaching ability, 38.24% of students thought the online class was boring and 20.58% of students admitted they could not get accustomed to online classes. 18.75% of the teachers in the interview admitted they lacked experience in conducting online classes. The live online class under the epidemic situation is generally an action that directly transfers the face-to-face classroom to the online teaching platform without sufficient design and preparation. Some teachers might not have made full use of the potential resources in online teaching platforms to promote participation and interactions in class. The online curriculum teaching design, classroom teaching organization, and teachers’ teaching ability imposed an enormous impact on whether classroom discourse systems were pulled towards a pattern of silence or non-silence. Apart from the above-mentioned factors, an unstable signal was also an online-related problem that affected the pleasure and interest of students’ learning, although it only caused problems to a very small number of students who lived in remote areas.

Online teaching is a complex systematic project and calls for a lot of work to be done in the supervision of students, design of the curriculum, organization of classroom teaching, improvement of teachers’ online teaching ability, and construction of teaching platforms to reduce students’ silence to build high-quality online classes and improve students’ performance.

Secondly, the factors accounting for silence are interrelated with each other and silence is usually the result of multiple factors, each of which cannot be separated as a single factor that causes students’ silence in online classrooms, while language incompetence still plays the most important role in students’ silence. According to the questionnaire, the vast majority of students attributed their silence in online classes to more than one factor. For example, 58.82% of student participants for the questionnaire admitted that language incompetence contributed to their silence in class, yet most of them do not think that was the only reason that counted for their inactivity: some of them admitted that they were also lack of interest in the course and not sure about or not knowing the answer as well as not able to concentrate when using smartphones or computers to have class; Some of them thought apart from language incompetence many other factors such as their nervousness or shyness, their fear of losing face, teachers’ improper teaching mode, teachers’ incapability to make students understand also contribute to their classroom silence. Another example is that some students attributed their silence to several factors such as lack of concentration when using smartphones or computers to take classes, teachers’ improper teaching mode, lack of study motivation, and fear of losing face. Some factors are found to be difficult to classify. For example, inadequate online teaching ability can be classified as a teacher-related factor or online-related factor, and fear of losing face can be a student’s factor or cultural factor. In a word, the phenomenon of students’ silence in online EFL classes is the result of the joint action of student-related factors, teacher-related factors, online-related factors, and cultural factors.

A total of 58.82% of students and 50% of teachers attributed silence to language incompetence (Table 6 and Table 7), that is, in both students’ and teachers’ eyes, language incompetence was the primary reason for students’ silence. This is also affirmed in some previous studies proving language incompetence influences students’ classroom performance in many ways. Some students have difficulty understanding teachers’ questions, others have difficulty expressing themselves in English (Wang, 2015). Students are also reported to have anxiety over their pronunciation and intonation (Li, 2014); Students lack interest in English and confidence in themselves (Chen, 2020); Some students are afraid of losing face (Petress, 2001; Jackson, 2002; Yu, 2016). What’s more, language incompetence may also cause some other problems such as students’ absent-mindedness in class, a feeling of boredom in class and not getting used to online classes. Another interesting finding is that those students who thought they were not given enough chances to respond to interaction usually were not silent students but active students with good language competence. The teachers did not always give those active students enough chances due to limited class time or teachers’ consideration of giving chances to other less active students. This was confirmed by three teachers (T1, T7, and T16) in the interview.

Therefore, students’ language competence takes an essential part in class performance, and with the improvement of their language competence, many other factors that prevent them from participating in classroom interaction tend to reduce.

This study provides evidence of a clear and common tendency toward silence in online EFL classes of English-majored students at Hunan Institute of Technology. The study results contribute to the literature by demonstrating that multiple factors are responsible for students’ silence in online EFL classes during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the study results and discussion in the paper, some practical enlightenment on online language education is obtained:

First, improvement of teachers’ online teaching ability and competence is conducive to class interaction. Teachers’ online teaching ability and competence are the decisive factors affecting the effect of online teaching. Teachers play a significant role and they are remarkable factors behind students’ silence, as Table 6 and Table 7 indicate, because teachers are the facilitators of the lessons, determining learners’ participation opportunities and interest in classrooms. The approach the teachers use to conduct their lessons and how they interact with their students exert a great impact on students’ silence, which coincides with findings in some previous studies. Tsui (1996) found that teachers’ improper ways of interacting with students, intolerance of silence, uneven allocation of turns, incomprehensible input, and short wait time, are factors contributing to silence in classrooms. The study by Clifton (2006) and by Lee and Ng (2010) confirmed that teacher interaction strategy does affect students’ participation behavior. Teachers’ competence affects the level of satisfaction of the students (Gray & DiLoreto, 2016). Martin, Wang, and Sadaf (2018) found that the teachers’ course design has a substantial influence on the online class’s student performance. Moser, Wei & Brenner (2021) claimed lack of prior experience with online teaching and inadequate training are the primary source of students’ frustrations. Therefore, teachers should polish their technical skills, rearrange the course design, and timely summarize online teaching experience to quickly adapt to the teaching environment as well as role change and improve online teaching ability. In other words, teachers need to address the issue of students’ silence in the EFL classes, which is also confirmed by a majority of teachers in the semi-structured interview. For example, the course design of online classes should provide essential details like course content, educational goals, course structure, and course output in a consistent manner so that students will find the e-learning system beneficial to them (Almaiah & Alyoussef, 2019).

Second, a proper strategy for promoting class attendance and participation should be advocated in improving class interaction. Class attendance and participation can not only reflect students’ learning behavior but also reflect the effectiveness of teachers’ teaching and provide important basic data information for teaching reform (Zhao et al., 2022). Awarding students grades to stimulate students to attend class and participate in classroom interaction is a widely used effective strategy, noted by several experienced teachers (T1, T5, T7, T12, T14, and T16) in the semi-interviews of the study. The face-hiding feature of the online class frees students from teachers’ face-to-face supervision, which makes students more likely to be absent-minded or distracted and even absent from class. If class attendance and participation are to carry credit, then teachers should explain to students how meaningful class attendance and participation can contribute to overall learning and students’ final grade of the course, and instead of devaluing silence, the notion of participation should be expanded to include making vocal or literal responses, providing online quiz or games or any sort of interaction initiated by teachers. The interaction strategy is also important, as teachers need to carefully design questions, avoid too difficult or too easy questions in the process of interaction, and pay attention to real-time feedback. At the same time, teachers who interact with students should adopt appropriate techniques to promote efficient and effective understanding for the students (Lydy et al., 2016).

Third, careful selection of teaching platforms facilitates a smooth class interaction. As the study results indicate, while the pandemic gives birth to online teaching, it also brings business opportunities to the network online teaching platform. The teaching management department needs to consult teachers and students and study the teachers’ teaching habits and students’ learning hobbies to select a platform. In addition, online teaching has high requirements for network equipment, teaching software, and bandwidth traffic, especially live teaching. A large number of technical and connection problems such as poor network speed, unstable signal, incompatible software, hardware, and unfamiliarity with the function or operation of the platform, more or less directly or indirectly, contribute to students’ silence. Colleges and universities should allow teachers to choose among various platforms to effectively avoid network congestion and improve the satisfaction of teachers and students. To improve the interactions between teachers and students, teachers can adopt the mode of “live broadcast platform + conference platform / Wechat or QQ group”, using Wechat Group or QQ Group as the main tool and way for classroom or after-class discussion, as shown in this study.

Finally, the improvement of students’ language competence is essential to alleviate their silence. As the study result indicates that language incompetence still played the most important role in students’ silence and many other factors hindering students from participating in class interaction were rooted in or more or less related to it, it is necessary to improve students’ language competence. With the improvement of their language competence, their confidence will increase and their nervousness and shyness, as well as fear of embarrassment, will reduce, thus their participation tends to increase and improve. Therefore, teachers should stimulate students’ interests and create as many opportunities as possible for students to have target language output by carrying out various activities for classroom interaction. Students should be motivated and inspired to do more practice in listening, speaking, reading, and writing to boost language competence.

This study explored the phenomenon and cause of students’ silence in online EFL classes. The study result shows that the phenomenon of students’ silence in online EFL classes is a common problem and students’ and teachers’ interpretations of silence fall into similar categories, namely student-related factors, teacher-related factors, online-related factors, and cultural factors. These factors appear to be linked and each factor cannot be separated as a single factor accounting for students’ silence, while students’ linguistic problem obviously plays the most important role and online-related factors are also an important cause of it. Meanwhile, teacher-related factors are also influential while cultural factors are almost negligible when explaining online students’ silence. Based on the study results and analysis, the following pedagogical enlightenment on the improvement of students’ performance in online EFL classes are obtained: improvement of teachers’ online teaching ability and competence, incentivization of class attendance and participation, careful selection of teaching platform, and improvement of students’ language competence.

Therefore, this study is significant in providing new insights for diagnosis and interpretation of students’ silence in online live EFL classes in the context of the drastic popularity of online classes worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will help teachers, school management departments and researchers get a better understanding of the phenomenon and cause of students’ silence in online classrooms, to implement corresponding strategies to improve online teaching quality.

However, this study has its limitations. Firstly, the study sample was small. Thus, if the data were collected from various universities or colleges, it could have given better comparative results to understand the student’s silence. Secondly, there was a lack of classroom observation methods applied in this study to collect data on how students and teachers behave in each class. Thirdly, the types of questions in the questionnaires and semi-interview might not be sufficient to include all potential factors relevant to students’ silence. Thus, more comprehensive research is needed with more participants and through more in-depth classroom observation, questionnaires, and interviews.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This work was supported by the Teaching Reform Project of the Hunan Institute of Technology (Grant number JY202231).

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Investigating Silence in Online EFL Classes Among University Students in China during COVID-19 pandemic

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Abstract

Figures

1. Introduction

2. Literature Review

3. Methodology

3.1 Participants

3.2 Study procedure

3.3 Data Collecting

3.3.1 Statistics from Online Teaching Platform

3.3.2 Questionnaires for students

3.3.3 Semi-structured interviews with teachers

4. Result

4.1 The common phenomenon of students’ silence in the online EFL classes

4.2 Factors contributing to students’ silence

5. Discussion

6. Pedagogical Implication Of The Study

7. Conclusion

Declarations

References

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