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Try to discover whether the shy student behaves this way in every class, or just your own. Ask both male and female students, the confident and the shy, those of a higher level and a lower level, etc. Distribute your questions evenly through the class, from front to back, left to right, etc.

To overcome this kind of stonewalling, ask for answers from individual students (which is how things work in most classrooms in Asia, anyway) but ensure that you don’t (as also happens often) always choose the same people. These trends are changing, and their influence is becoming easier to overstate, year on year, but I urge you not to underestimate the power of traditions which have many centuries’ pedigree. There is an old Chinese adage, used in a different context by former leader Deng Xiaoping: If a bird leaves the flock, we shoot it. I generalize here, almost to the point of being irresponsible, but long-standing Chinese (and more generally, Asian) cultural traits include fear of being mistaken, and an unwillingness to step outside of the group. Many a perfectly competent teacher has stood in front of a group of Chinese students, asked a question of just the right level, and received a wall of silence in reply. Boredom and disinterest have their own signals – staring out of the window, fidgeting, bothering neighbors, using cellphones or working on material for another class. If a student is really hating the class (or, just as troublingly, hating the teacher personally) then this tends to be obvious in their facial expression there’s also often a slouched posture.

Is the student staring at you, waiting for clarification? Is there a questioning look in their eye? Are they glancing at their classmates for help? These gestures tend to result from incomprehension, while staring down or away could mean poor fluency or fearfulness. How can we possibly know which is responsible? The problem is that every one of these possible origins for shyness results in exactly the same sound: silence.