Learning to be silent: examining Chinese elementary students’ stories about why they do not speak in class

Prior research often attributed Chinese students’ classroom silence to their previous schooling experiences, yet rarely provides evidence of exactly how these experiences shaped students into silent learners. Through surveys and in-depth interviews with Chinese 6th graders, our study examined how students ‘learned to be silent’. Guided by the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework, our analysis showed that students’ non-participating...