Negotiating Silence in American Classrooms: Three Chinese Cases

A common observation about Chinese students in American classrooms is their silence, which has been speculated on by many second-language acquisition researchers as the result of the students' lacking communicative competence compatible to their native-English-speaking counterparts. By focusing on three students from mainland China as part of a larger investigation of Asian students' classroom communication patterns in US universities, this paper explores in depth the complexities of silence, and the cultural interpretations of silence in various social contexts. Multiple functions of silence in terms of linkage, affecting, revelational, judgemental, and activating functions are explored across the three cases. This paper further investigates how Chinese students construct their identities through silence, and how they can reconstruct their identities by negotiating silence in American classrooms and by developing adaptive cultural transformation competence in the target culture.