Beliefs about Silence in the Classroom

Abstract

A questionnaire methodology was used to elicit beliefs and attitudes about silence in the classroom from 319 students aged between 14-16 in three secondary schools in Wales.The three schools can be described as 'rural','urban-suburban' and 'urban-inner city'. The socio-economic background of the students may be described as mainly 'working class' for the rural and inner-city schools, and 'middle class' for the suburban school. The inner city school had the highest proportion of students who reported ethnolinguistic backgrounds other than Welsh. Our overall finding was that students believed that they were more silent in the classroom than their teachers, complementing earlier findings of ethnographic and discourse analytic studies. We suggest that for pupils silence is the relatively unmarked, underlying linguistic form in the classroom, while for teachers silence is relatively marked and talk is unmarked. Our results also confirmed the relative importance of silence for learning rather than for teaching. Specifically, students believed that they were more silent when learning than their teachers are when teaching. Furthermore, students in the rural and inner-city schools valued silence in the classroom more than the students in the suburban school, which we explain in terms of the social make up of the three schools.