Explaining the Silence in Seminars among Chinese Undergraduate Students in UK Universities

Abstract

Recently, Britain is becoming the second most popular choice for international students, particularly, the Chinese students make up the largest proportion. The most common issue of Chinese students is silence in classrooms, that lead to negative engagement and academic performance. Four main factors to silence includes language proficiency, language anxiety, accent, and previous learning experience. However, only a few studies explore the impact of the current learning experience on silence. Therefore, this study will address this gap via a small-scale questionnaire study. The results show that language proficiency is the most crucial obstacle for Chinese students to actively engage. Anxiety also contributes to the silence in seminars, while the accent is less relevant. Moreover, the prior learning experience has an impact on students' engagement as expected. These findings disclose some theoretical evidence for UK universities policymakers.