We, teachers always feel like worried, confused, stressed, disappointed and pessimistic when there are some so-called silent and passive students in our language classrooms. Some of the teachers do even feel unable to control their feelings and often shout at those silent and passive ones when they do not take part in learning activities as they are expected to. It is acknowledged that there are some students who do not pay any attentions to their teachers’ lessons. However, to the best of my knowledge, it’s  not because  they are naughty, lazy or bad students but because of several other reasons. For example, our lessons may not be interesting enough to attract them or because they do not have enough language background to take part in those activities. Therefore, what we should do now to attract those students and make them more so-called active and eager-to-speak ones are as following:

• Double check whether the instructions are clear or not.
• Double check whether the topics in our planned activities are popular and close to students or not.
• Double check whether our planned activities are varied or not.
• Make sure every student understands those instructions.
• Do ask those students simple and easy-to-answer questions to keep them interested.
• Do praise them whenever they do something good or have a correct answer even  the question for that answer is the easiest. Some of these expressions may be powerful: Excellent, Well done, Good, That’s interesting, Great etc.
• Be more human to them. It means “trust them and treat them like your own small brothers and sisters”.
• Patiently talk to them and help them sort things out.
• Arrange them in a group of students of the same level to make them feel more secured and pay more attention to this group.
• Provide them with enough background before asking them to do the activities.

The more patient you are with your students and the more inputs you provide them, the better outputs your students will show.