Page 118 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 5. Performance and perceptions of silence 105

open floor and bidding. Identification of these participation patterns was derived
from the notion of ‘participant structures’ in classroom settings (Philips 1972),
but was modified based on my own data analysis.
These three participation patterns can be described as follows. Situations in
which the teacher produces a long stretch of turn which consists of multiple turn
construction units (TCUs) or in which a student produces a turn as a ratified
speaker can be described as ‘bidding’, and bear relatively low pressure for stu-
dents to participate verbally. Situations in which the teacher (or a student) ad-
dresses a question to the whole class, such as “Do you have any comments?”, can
be described as ‘open floor’ participation patterns with medium level and equally
distributed pressure for participation. In the final case, situations in which an in-
dividual or a specific subgroup of students in the class is nominated by either the
teacher or a student are regarded as ‘individual nomination’ patterns and entail a
high level of pressure for participation.
Self-selecting a turn when there is no explicit stimulus to open the floor to
the whole class is coded as a turn in the ‘bidding’ category. Interruption by an
unratified speaker is also classified in the ‘bidding’ category. However, turn-tak-
ing with overlapping near the previous speaker’s turn completion, in other words,
transition relevance place (TRP) (Sacks et al. 1974), is not considered interrup-
tion and it can occur in any of the three participatory patterns described above.
(For interruption and overlap, see Blimes 1997; Sacks et al. 1974; Schegloff 2000;
Tannen 1983.)
The third aspect of classroom interaction for coding is the quality of verbal
participation. This aspect of verbal contribution in tutorials and seminars was
found to be important in investigating the silence of Japanese students, since in-
terview as well as observation data suggested that Japanese students could be per-
ceived as silent because they do not perform certain types of participation moves.
Since the interview and observation data showed that comments and questions
are rarely raised by Japanese students in the classroom, participation types were
given the following categories: comments, questions, clarification questions, fac-
tual response, yes-no response and supporting moves (for example, “yeah,” “that’s
right”). The categories were data driven and derived from interviews, question-
naires, survey and observation. For details, sample coding sheets can be found in
Appendix 5.

5.2.3.2 Conversation analysis
The second type of analysis applied to the recorded classroom interaction data is
discourse analysis using a conversation analysis (CA) approach. Although tradi-
tionally, CA has exclusively studied monolingual interaction involving only native
speakers of the language (Carroll 2000; Markee 2000; Wong 2000), recent studies