The chapter addresses the question of what every teacher should do to cope with undesirable silence in the classroom as it impedes a vibrant climate of open discussion and mutual learning. A case study of unhappy silent learners in context is then presented to demonstrate how one might suffer from poor silence and what can be done to improve such situations. The discussion addresses the question: What should teachers do when many students in the class are silent? What is the best solution to the lack of participation? It does so by highlighting that one best answer to all problems related to silence is non-existent. Instead, before the teacher copes with problematic silence in the classroom, it is important to consider the diverse ways in which students exercise silence. Through empirical data, the author demonstrates that silence is the consequence of their struggle in three distinct ways. They struggle with themselves, with the present and with the past. Each of these dimensions is unpacked in the chapter together with concrete suggestions on how to cope with them.

The chapter argues that both speech and silence host the formulation of ideas. However, these two modes do not perform this task independently but do so on an inter-related and turn-taking basis. Such movement is important not only in communication but also in teaching as the two gears that support student learning. Some teachers, however, routinely spend too long in one gear and not long enough in the other as they fill class time with excessive verbalisation. The discussion identifies key elements that shape pedagogy for silence. It unpacks the association between silence and speech, recommends a set of principles and strategies for productive silence and offers a procedure for task design to support the reflective learner. The author emphasises that it would be misleading to credit all kinds of classroom interaction solely to the presence of speech. A competent teacher must know that student learning comes from both the process of thinking and the delivery of thoughts. Therefore teachers should pay attention to the aim and timing of their pedagogical decisions to speak and to stay quiet. The teacher s decision to shift between silence and speech is a fundamental skill in pedagogy, which does not happen naturally but needs practice to be effective.

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.

This discussion highlights how contradiction exists between what some scholars fervently visualise and what many learners genuinely experience. Digital education has been viewed from both a macro perspective and a micro perspective. Scholars who take the former standpoint conceptualise the field as an exciting movement with massive positive changes sweeping across the globe. From a micro perspective, however, the above revolution does not reach every student equally but numerous problems keep occurring in online academic settings. The author argues that silence is undesirable when it occurs in idleness without thought processing and idea production. This happens when students listen for information but make no effort to form questions, develop viewpoints, respond to issues, or find solutions to problems. The chapter presents some challenging characteristics of online education with a focus on several contradictions between teacher and student expectations. A set of practical suggestions are offered to assist teachers in coping with undesirable online silence. These strategies address components such as learning content, communication, choices, collaboration, task performance, protocols and scaffolding of student learning.

The author argues that L2 fluency is not only a social product but also a mental process and much of that process contains learner responses to task design. Unfortunately, empirical research into the dynamic of how learner silence interacts with task design hardly exists to this day. In the literature on second language acquisition, it is talk, not silence, that receives recognition as output. However, to assume that output must always be audible represents a constricted way of understanding how learning progresses. Depending on how silence is employed, the occurrence of inner speech in the learner’s system deserves to be viewed as a type of production, especially when thoughts are taking shape in the mind. The chapter justifies the need to consider the role of silence in task design and task performance. Since the relationship between tasks and silence is under-explored, the author has conducted a series of research projects to uncover such dynamics. These studies are reported and discussed in detail, with concrete examples and pedagogical implications for materials development.

The chapter defines the meaning of online silence, explains how it occurs in virtual classroom settings and unpacks the phenomenon as learning engagement or the lack of it in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. Online silence is an unsettled, under-theorised construct without a universal definition but varies according to context and educators’ various levels of patience when waiting for learner response. The author argues that online silence represents both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. Drawn extensively from the research discourse on the occurrence and absence of learner participation, the discussion outlines how silence pervades the digital educational environment. The discussion first defines the meaning of online silence and examines how online instruction provokes silence. Secondly, the dynamic of silence is unpacked concerning both learning engagement and learning disengagement in cognitive, social, emotional, and technological dimensions. Thirdly, it is argued that online silence exhibits two opposing impacts by being both a barrier to and a condition for learning efficacy. The chapter embraces online silence in language learning and in subject-content education considering that learners need to develop not only language proficiency but also knowledge and skills for real-world communication.

The chapter highlights that the relationship between silence and output remains insignificant in SLA discourse. That is, little is known about how pre-verbal messages are processed in the mind. Pre-verbal messages are part of the conceptualisation stage of language processing, which precedes the formulation and articulation of speech production. The author argues that although SLA researchers have looked extensively into the quality of speech and are highly competent in identifying the complexity of both meaningful and meaningless verbal output, when it comes to silence, our sophisticated expertise is confronted by new challenges. The discussion identifies the presence of silence in second language acquisition by looking beyond the initial silent period to examine various scholarly attitudes towards the role of silence in SLA works and to point out the gap in SLA research on silence. After explaining the reason why the discourse on SLA does not share views on silence, the chapter argues that not all types of silence benefit L2 development and that some kinds of silence facilitate SLA while others may not.

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.

This chapter highlights the reality that silence is a belittled construct. For many years, more scholars have suspected and denied silence than have embraced and understood it. The discussion recommends including silence in pedagogy to advance it. The discussion responds to some burning questions including why silence-inclusive pedagogy is needed and why it remains an underdeveloped area in the field, how silence has historically emerged as a theme and when silence research commenced, what makes silence such a debatable construct in language education, what has hindered collective scholarly efforts to consider silence in pedagogy, and finally, how the book is structured to present what it promises. The chapter also explains the title of the book, Silence in English Language Pedagogy. This title captures both imagination and reality – imagination because silence has yet to be a well-established component in pedagogy, at least until now; reality because the appeal for utilising the presence of silence in classroom teaching has been ongoing in the field for the past five decades.

The chapter evaluates the question ‘why silent?’ in research and reconceptualises how such inquiry should be contextualised to make the investigation more meaningful and freer from prejudice. To do so, the discussion presents a range of critical scenarios where silence fails to function productively, elaborates how problems occur in context and suggests ways of coping with each of those problems. The author argues that silence is an open construct whose meaning cannot be universally conclusive. The ‘why silent?’ inquiry, which demands a once-and-for-all answer, may not be useful as it risks diminishing the dynamic of a highly complex and constantly changing experience. A student who is quiet in one class may not be quiet in another class. To capture this person as an inherently shy learner might be misleading because such a trait may vanish when the student is reconditioned by a new classroom setting. This means that what researchers have tried so hard to seize has now become non-existent. Silence is a chameleon whose behaviour constantly responds to its surroundings rather than acting independently.