Social anxiety and silence in Japan's tertiary foreign language classrooms

[First paragraph] This chapter considers the intriguing relationship which exists between social anxiety and the silences of second language (L2) learners within a Japanese EFL classroom context. Although in recent years extensive attention has been focused on the impact anxiety has on L2 oral performance (e.g. Liu & Jackson, 2008; Woodrow, 2006), to date little consideration has been given to this issue when placing silence itself at the heart of the investigation. Rather than signifying a meaningless blank occurring during the course of a lesson, the reality of L2 classroom silence is that it has various forms and functions, and emerges through complex multiple and concurrent routes (King, 2013a; 2013b). Within the Japanese context, some of the most salient of these routes connect to psychological and emotional factors which see a complex interplay of learner-internal and environmental issues interact to support the silent behaviour of socially inhibited students