Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2023
The chapter 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. The author highlights that the concept of silence research in the 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 make ELT pedagogy silence-inclusive, lessons are drawn from research in both language learning and the broader discipline of education. Owing to 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.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.