Language & Intercultural Communication
Editor: Dr John Corbett (University of Glasgow)
Associate Editor: Robert Crawshaw (Lancaster University)
Reviews and Criticism Editor: Dr Fiona J. Doloughan (University of Surrey)
Editorial Board: Gavin Jack (University of Stirling)
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Volume: 2 Number: 1 Page: 37–54
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Negotiating Silence in American Classrooms: Three Chinese Cases
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Jun Liu
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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.
© Multilingual Matters 2002
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