Page 107 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

94 Silence in Intercultural Communication

In this case, silence symbolises the message, “this discussion is pointless,” and is
an aspect of Japanese students’ silence which also does not seem to be recognised
by lecturers. As discussed earlier, negative feelings can be found among Japanese
students who accuse Australian students of saying what is irrelevant, as the fol-
lowing comments show:
(48) F9: My impression is that occasionally, occasionally, or well, often, how can
I say, because they can use English, they, like, say what they don’t need to
say. How can I put it...
I: What do you mean by ‘what they don’t need to say?’
F9: Well for example, going off the track. But because they are native
speakers, they can say even tedious things as much as they like, right?
[20:48:50 F9]

In fact, some students argue that they are unfairly judged as incompetent because
of their silence:
(49) When I feel I am perhaps misunderstood is, like, it is said that, like over here,
how can I say, if you don’t claim where you stand, or if you don’t speak up, um
people would think you are not thinking at all, something like that. I think
there is a tendency to be regarded that way. [8:152 M5]

(50) I don’t worry [about participation marks] too much. (laugh) Well, but I
wonder what it is to ‘participate.’ For example, may be there are students who
always ask questions, but if you know [the answer], you don’t need to ask
questions, right? [30:87 F7]

In this case, silence may be a message of “this discussion is going off the track and
the important point we need to consider is....” However, this does not seem to be
recognised by lecturers, naturally because it is not ‘heard.’ This type of silence is
then recognised as a ‘lack of critical thinking skills’ when it actually bears a ‘criti-
cal’ message about the direction of the discussion, in which case all participants in
class may be missing out on a more meaningful interchange. Indeed, while there
may be cases in which Australian students’ comments are irrelevant, there may be
cases where Japanese students’ potentially relevant thoughts and ideas are likely to
remain unspoken, and unrecognised. At the same time, it is also possible that such
negative comments by the Japanese students may be used, in some cases, to justify
their silence because of lack of interactive or lexico-grammatical competence.
The question then arises as to what is actually regarded as ‘irrelevant’ by Japa-
nese students but ‘relevant’ by Australian students. One factor or relevance can
be seen in the way in which, Australian students were often found to be associat-