I’m experiencing life as a L2 learner for four hours. One of our colleagues, Susan, has volunteered to teach eight of us ESL teachers beginning Farsi for professional development. After we have learned some basics, she does an oral “drill”. She calls on me, and I feel some pressure to respond quickly not wanting to make everyone wait. To my relief, though, Susan patiently remains silent while I formulate my answer.

As she calls on others, I become aware of how I am feeling. To my surprise, unlike how I imagined my ESL students feeling in these situations, I , as an L2 learner, am not restlessly yearning for a faster pace. Instead, I appreciate the chance to formulate responses in my own mind, and when I’m called on again, I feel my stress level diminish.

 According to research, many of us ESL teachers find silence to be uncomfortable. And this can result in loss opportunities.

Unlike my Farsi-teaching colleague, many teachers in similar situations feel pressure to keep students from becoming bored while another student is answering a teacher-posed question. To relieve this pressure, these teachers try to maintain a quick pace allowing each student a short amount of time to answer a question. In a study of questions and answers in four traditionally-organized ESL classrooms, researcher found that the teacher asked 1,387 questions and waited an average of only 2.1 seconds for a student to respond before repeating, rephrasing or calling on another student to answer. It seems obvious that if the teacher expects an answer within two seconds the student’s answer would have to be one that requires little thought. As the researchers pointed out, in such a situation, “what they say is less important than how they say it.”  The teacher knows in advance what the grammatically correct answer is and is listening to see if the students can answer correctly. It is form rather than depth that takes priority.

As my brief experience as a student of Farsi demonstrates, the self-imposed pressure that teachers are feeling may be based on false assumptions that students will get bored or restless if the teacher remains silent for more than 2.1 seconds. Instead, that silence could be the most important “gift” the teacher can give the students.

For more about my insights during my experience as an L2 learner, see • Challenge Your Teaching Assumptions: Become an L2 Student for a Few Hours  .

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus