穨Review. Pdf

participants who paused longer than seven seconds. There were ten students (33%) 
in the control group and eight (20%) in the experimental group that caused silence 
during the oral task. 
The reacting strategies to communication breakdown like silence could be an 
important indicator of communicative competence. With appropriate tactics, one 
could reduce the embarrassment to a certain degree. In this study, some of the 
students signaled to their partners so that their dialogue could continue. Others 
would go on with their own lines despite of their partners’ unresponsiveness. The 
worst situation was that the students gave up the rest of the task without any endeavor 
to recover at all. In the following sections, the participants’ reactions to their 
partner’s silence as well as how they reacted to their own silence were analyzed.

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4.1.3.1 Reactions to Partners’ Silence
During the performance of the oral task, there were many occurrences of 
communication breakdown because some students were too nervous to talk in front of 
the whole class. The most common event of communication breakdown was 
forgetting what to say. Table 4.12 showed that five students out of eight in the 
experimental group tried hard to remind their partners of their lines so that they could 
complete the task together. But there was only one student in the control group that 
demonstrated this cooperative behavior.
Table 4.12 Reactions to Others’ Silence 
Strategic Competence I (unit: person) 
Reactions to partners’ silence 
Control 
(Total 10 persons) 
Experimental 
(Total 8 persons) 
A. Trying to remind 
1 
5 
B. Finishing one’s lines despite 
of partner’s silence
3 
2 
C. Giving up the task 
6 
1 
As a sharp contrast to the cooperative behavior in the experimental group, there 
was a high tendency to give up the task in the control group. As shown in Table 4.12, 
there were six students who simply gave up the rest of the task whenever there was a 
communication breakdown—but only one student gave up the task in the 
experimental group. The ratio of trying to remind and attempting to complete the 
task between the two groups pointed to one conclusion: the experimental group 
demonstrated more positive social skills and were thus more competent in managing 
communication breakdown as shown in Figure 4.2. 

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0
2
4
6
trying to remind
giving up
control
experimental