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.

The author highlights that our current knowledge of silence is founded on different concerns that do not seem to be evenly distributed in the research discourse. While some topics are meticulously investigated to yield insightful views on thought processes, others still need to advance further and some remain largely neglected. This chapter highlights those areas, which include established themes (growing research with helpful knowledge that informs the field), evolving themes (areas drawing researcher attention that should continue to do so), inactive themes (research with reiterated outcomes without much novel discovery), and under-explored themes (existing research gaps that need to be addressed). The chapter comments on the status quo of silence research to this day in terms of what has and has not been sufficiently investigated. This overview highlights productive research themes, themes that need more empirical work, themes that seem to stand still without new outcomes, and themes that are currently neglected. There are suggestions for how to move the field of silence studies forward.