Why are students silent in class? "Silence" refers to those who do not participate verbally in discussions or ask questions, those who attend classes and by the end of semester leave without having said a word. Janice Cools has always wanted to understand the culture of silent students in her writing classrooms but had never directly tackled the issue beyond informally asking a few students over the years why they were silent. "Why silence?" was a question that resurfaced when she started teaching Advanced English (3211), a first-year honors writing class in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM), in the fall of 2014. In much of the scholarship on silence in the ELL/ESL classroom, there seemed to be an over-reliance on Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) to explain silence. ESL/ELL students often experienced "the feeling of tension and apprehension specifically associated with second language [L2] contexts, including speaking, listening, and learning" (MacIntyre and Gardner 284 qtd. in Liu and Jackson 72). According to this theory, students tended to exhibit FLA in three components: "Comprehension apprehension" (fear due to limited knowledge of the language); "fear of negative evaluation," (students who are silent because they see language errors "as a threat to their image, and a source for negative evaluations either from the teacher or their peers)." The third component is "test anxiety" ("a situation in which students consider the foreign language process, and especially oral production, as a test situation, rather than an opportunity for communication and skills improvement" (Tsiplakides, Iakovos, and Keramida 39). Some scholarship on ELL and silence offered explanations beyond FLA. Myung Jeong Ha, for instance, suggests that non-native students' classroom silence included "not only language-related issues but also issues of emotion, culture, and identity" (86). In addition to mentioning "low levels of proficiency," and "fear of making mistakes," Tsui identified intolerance of silence, uneven allocation of turns, incomprehensible input, and short wait time" as contributing reasons for silence in the ESL/ELL class (Lee and Ng 303). This author's review of ESL/ELL students' silences had her wondering if similar explanations operated in her second language classroom. Adopting an ethnographic methodology presented a means of accessing her students' perspectives on their silences. Using self-reflexive ethnography allowed her to engage in critical self-reflection about her relationship with her students. She employed three methods: observing, interviewing, and the study of artifacts or communication produced by her students.