Page 119 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

106 Silence in Intercultural Communication

of NS-NNS interaction with CA have been able to reveal how NSs and NNSs be-
have in negotiating and constructing context (Firth 1995; Firth & Wagner 1997;
Gardner & Wagner 2004; Wong 2000). However, there is a large gap, between CA
and ethnography, in the description of ‘context’; CA insists on limiting ‘context’
to locally evoked context while ethnography includes culture and environment
external to local ‘context’ (Duranti & Goodwin 1992; Markee 2000; Moerman
1988). Thus, it has generally been considered impossible to integrate CA and eth-
nography in a study (Markee 2000; Schegloff 1987).
Nevertheless, some researchers have integrated CA with ethnography in their
studies of talk-in-interaction, justifying the importance of ethnographic informa-
tion to understand what goes on in culturally situated talk-in-interaction (Cicourel
1992; Moerman 1998). The present research, believing that CA and ethnography
can benefit from each other, aims to integrate analysis from both approaches. This
is because the main interest of the research is in the interaction between percep-
tions and performance of silence, and ethnography provides for perceptions while
CA provides for performance. Furthermore, both approaches allow us to see how
perception affects performance and vice versa. For this purpose, the analysis fol-
lowed the fundamental principles of ‘pure’ CA, which only take account of local
context. Only after describing the participants co-constructed the context and
social order was the ethnographic information brought in.
In terms of the relevance of CA to the investigation of silence, it seems rea-
sonable to suggest that CA is one of the most appropriate tools to study silence in
talk. This is because CA treats silences such as gaps, pauses and lapses as impor-
tant units in the analysis of talk-in-interaction (Sacks et al. 1974). For example,
Jefferson’s study (1989) of silent pauses and gaps in ordinary English conversation
has shown, importantly, that participants in talk are likely to make certain moves
when a silence of around one second or more occurs in conversational situations.
Jefferson’s finding is relevant to the present research, along with one of the norms
of turn-taking argued by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) that, at the next possible op-
portunity to speak, the doer of the second pair part (SPP) of an adjacency pair
has to do the SPP. Furthermore, in studies of silence in intercultural commu-
nication, the duration of gaps and the use of silence in performing SPPs have
been extensively discussed (Carbaugh & Poutiainen 2000; Enninger 1987; Scollon
1985). These strengths of the CA approach, along with the quantitative analysis
mentioned above, facilitated an empirical assessment of the widely-debated com-
municative silence of the Japanese speakers (see Chapter 2, Section 2.6).