The study examines students’ silence experience in an English language classroom of elementary level at Hanoi National University of Education (HNUE) and addresses teachers’ complaints about the students’ passivity during classroom interaction. It aims to seek answers to the questions of whether the students were actually ‘taking in’ or not from their teacher while they were keeping silent in classroom and to what extent their silence keeping affected their learning outcome. A ‘think-aloud’ tally sheet and a reading comprehension test were employed as the research instruments. The findings contributed to the discussion of students’ ‘silent period’. The study suggests that teachers of low levels therefore should not expect too much from their students to speak up in the earlier stage of learning and should instead aid their students’ comprehension by providing ‘comprehensible input’ and linguistic resources for them to take in. Their silence keeping may be attributed to some other factors such as teacher instruction, individual personality, motivation, learning materials rather than the language acquisition process itself. Keywords: Classroom interaction, silence, silent period, think aloud. | Silence in classroom interaction A case study of students of English at elementary level at Hanoi national University of Education
