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Chapter II Literature Review

At present, more and more experts and teachers have been paying attention to thephenomenon of classroom silence. Researchers focus on the causes of classroomsilence and the strategies to deal with this phenomenon. The scholars at home andabroad use different research methods and subjects to carry out their studies, and mostof them have made great achievements. In this chapter, the author firstly presents thedefinition of silence, classroom silence and the classification of silence, thenillustrates the theoretical foundation of this study, and finally reviews the relevantresearches at home and abroad.

2.1 Silence and Classroom Silence
Silence is a common phenomenon in human communication. According to asurvey, the proportion of silence accounts for about 5% to 65% in people’s dailyconversation. Generally, silence is defined as “no audible sound or noise,” which isthe lack of verbal communication. Phillips (1965) first uses the word “silence” andintroduces it into the communication field. In his viewpoint, people avoidcommunication because they believe speaking will lose more than silence. Burgoon(1976) defines silence as the unwillingness to communicate on the basis ofpersonality traits, such as low-esteem, alienation and introversion. McCroskey (1977)tends to regard silence as a kind of mental state, and points out that one of the subsetof silence is the fear of communication. Levinson (1983) focuses on the behavior ofsilence and defines it as the absence of vocalization. Keaten & Kelly (2000) alsostress the behavior characteristics of silence, those who tend to avoid communicationbeing regarded as the subjects of silence, and indicates that people keep silent forcertain purposes. Bilmes (1994) lays emphasis on the consequential characteristics ofsilence, namely, silence is “a case where people are expected to express themselves inwords but they don’t ” (Bilmes, 1994:77).
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2.2 Theoretical Foundation
The output hypothesis is Swain’s research crystallization after the study on theprogram of French immersion classroom teaching in Canada for several years. Swain(1995) proposes the output hypothesis, and points out that language output canpromote the fluency and accuracy of language expression, which is of vitalimportance in foreign language learning. In his views, plenty of language practice isgreatly needed if learners want to realize the internalization of language input. Theprocess of input is more of the grammar knowledge practice, which can not improvelearners’ comprehensive ability of using language. Only when learners make output,can they effectively use the existing language resources to think and recombine theirspeech that are going to be output, so that their language can be more accurate andeasier to be understood.Second language acquisition is realized by three functions of the comprehensibleoutput: noticing function, hypothesis-testing function and metalinguistic function.Noticing function means language learners can realize the differences between what they want to express and the actual expression content when they output their speech,which will trigger the consolidation of their existing knowledge and help them obtainnew information. Hypothesis-testing function refers to a process in which learnersattempt to apply the first language knowledge to the context of a second language andthen make ass