Page 134 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 5. Performance and perceptions of silence 121

of switching pauses in the first or native language may be transferred into commu-
nication in a second language, and if so, whether the difference would lead to the
silencing of one group by another. Indeed, as shown in Chapter 4, an unfamiliarity
with the fast rate of turn-taking was given as one of the explanations for silence by
Japanese students, some of whom also mentioned experiences of being interrupted
by Australian students. My Japanese high school study (Chapter 3) showed almost
no instance of overlapping talk but long silent switching pauses in classroom in-
teraction, and it was then left to the case studies to empirically investigate whether
a gap in the speed of turn-taking did actually exist between Japanese students and
their Australian peers, and to what extent silencing could be observed.
In this section, I will present some evidence from the case studies of a gap in
the speed of turn-taking between Australian and Japanese participants. In a situa-
tion where the Japanese student is nominated either by the lecturer or a peer stu-
dent, the gap resulted in three forms of pauses: (1) silent inter-turn pauses leading
to a delayed response turn; (2) silent inter-turn pauses leading to expansion of
the nomination turn; and (3) silent inter-turn pauses leading to other students’
self-selection. Following the discussion of these pauses, I will present a discussion
of silence in a situation where students participate through self-selection of their
turns.

5.4.2.1 Silent inter-turn pauses leading to a delayed response turn
The excerpts below show relatively long inter-turn silences between elicitations
and Japanese students’ responses. Although inter-turn silences greater than one
second, and up to three or four seconds, were commonly found where the floor
was open to any participant, they were much less common in the situation where
a student was selected for a response. In the excerpt below, the first pre-response
pause is one second (line 14), and the second one is 0.5 seconds (line 27). Since
Tadashi was the only student who had attended the previous week, the question
was directed at him, and there was no competition for the floor. Hence, although
these inter-turn pauses may not appear too long, considering the normative ‘no
gap, no overlap’ orientation found among English native speakers (Sacks et al.
1974), they can be significant in terms of the fine-tuning interaction.

(12) [Interaction: Tadashi, Curriculum and Examinations]

10 Lect: Okay, so: (0.4) what- (0.2) what does one of
11 what- (0.3) how would you describe the-
12 the main differences and what(0.2) we were
13 doing last week.
-> 14 (1.0)
-> 15 Tadashi: Ah yes. u:m (thi:s) norm reference. (0.4) norm