Page 120 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 5. Performance and perceptions of silence 107

5.2.4 Follow-up/stimulated recall interview

In multicultural and second language classroom research, follow-up interviews,
in which participants are asked to explain their behaviour as well as their per-
ception of others’ behaviour as they review the video-recorded classroom events,
has been used as a powerful strategy to validate findings from observation and
interaction analysis of recorded classroom events (Gass & Mackey 2000; Nunan
1992; Seliger & Shohamy 1989; Sevigny 1981). Considering that silence is a con-
text dependent and ambiguous phenomenon, and that its meaning and function
is heavily dependent on the inferences and perspectives of participants (Jaworski,
1993; Saville-Troike 1985), elicitation of the participants’ perceptions by follow-
up interviews are essential in the study of silence.
The three Japanese case study participants, the four lecturers in charge of the
observed sessions, and seven of Australian students who were in the observed
classes (one peer student of Tadashi, two of Aya and three of Miki) were inter-
viewed separately a short time after some of the observed sessions. All interview-
ees were asked questions about their interpretations of other participants’ speech
as well as intentions of their behaviour at particular points of interaction which
were relevant to the research focus. In order to avoid biased comments, partici-
pants of the interviews were not informed about the focus issue of silence.

5.3 Talk and silence in the case studies: Comparison of performance
and perceptions

The Japanese students’ self-perceptions of silence, which emerged from the in-
terviews (discussed in Chapter 4), confirm the widely discussed silence of ‘Asian
students in the West’ (Chapter 2). However, empirical evidence which supports
such attribution of silence to Asian students, in particular the actual amount of
talk and silence, is scarce. Hence, in the case studies, as mentioned above, the
quantity of participation was measured by coding the participants’ participation
in classroom interaction, that is, the ‘performance data,’ which will be presented
below. It will be discussed in relation to the participants’ perceptions of the Japa-
nese students’ performances as obtained through interviews.

5.3.1 Case Study 1: Tadashi

Tadashi had significantly fewer turns than his local Australian peers. Within the
total time of the two two-hour tutorials in the Teaching as a Profession class, he