The silence in the language class

Text: an original contemporary personal-review-style practice extract.

After the first language class, I drafted a complaint about its pace. The tutor spoke a short phrase, asked a question and then waited. I usually knew the answer before the silence began. By the end, my notebook contained fewer new expressions than I had expected, and I wrote that the lesson had stretched ten minutes of material across an hour.

Before posting the review, I read one from another learner. She praised the tutor for leaving enough time to shape an answer without somebody completing it for her. I assumed she meant the tutor. At the next class, however, I noticed how often my own voice entered the pause. I translated a word, supplied an ending or laughed encouragingly while somebody else was still deciding what to say.

The tutor asked those who had answered once to wait until two other people had spoken. The room did not suddenly become faster, but it became less predictable. A man who had barely spoken in the first class tried a complete sentence. Another learner corrected herself before anyone intervened. The pauses had not been empty; I had been filling them too quickly to discover what they allowed.

I still thought the course description should have made its introductory pace clearer. My final review said so, but it also mentioned my previous experience and the opportunities the pauses gave other learners. I had judged the class by how much it delivered to the quickest person in the room. That was relevant information, but it was not the only measure of whether the lesson worked.

The writer tries to encourage readers to examine the expectations and behaviour behind their judgements of an experience.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.