Silence in the Foreign Language Classroom: The Emotional Challenges for L2 Teachers

While learner silence in the classroom has recently become a topic of interest for teachers and researchers alike, the emotional effect of silence on classroom participants themselves remains largely understudied. Moreover, most studies of student silence in the classroom have primarily focused on its interplay in second language acquisition and L2 development (King in Silence in the second language classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstroke, 2013; Nakane in Silence in Intercultural Communication. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007). Of equal importance, however, is silence’s effect on the emotions and development of teachers themselves. An individual learner’s silence can have numerous emotional charges, and, because emotions are contextually and socially constructed, they can shift the emotional mood within the classroom more generally and affect the emotions of the teacher. When learner silence is not appropriately managed, the subsequent classroom environment can add to the emotional labour of teaching (King in New Directions in Language Learning Psychology. Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 97–112, 2016), and, in turn, affect teacher performance by disrupting teacher identity. This chapter will discuss three forms of this affective silence and examine how each form’s role enters into an ecological relationship between student and teacher emotions. After a brief review of recent literature on learner silence and the problems it poses for teacher identity, we apply the concept of emotional regulation to the negative effects of learner silence and offer productive emotional regulation strategies for educators.