Page 14 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

chapter 1

Introduction

Listening to silences can be just as instructive as listening to voices,
maybe more so. (Losey 1997: 191)

This book is concerned with the meanings and roles of silence in intercultural
communication. It explores the intricate relationship between perceptions and
performance of silence in interaction involving Japanese and Australian partici-
pants. Although silence is a phenomenon which people often consider to be mere-
ly ‘background’ to speech, it is in fact a complex, multifaceted and powerful ele-
ment of human interaction, which in recent years has come to be recognised to for
its important role in various aspects of communication. Furthermore, in the con-
text of globalisation, there is a need for more comprehensive research into silence
in intercultural encounters. In particular, silence has often been associated with
‘Asian’ or ‘Eastern’ cultures in intercultural communication, in contrast with the
association of the ‘West’ with articulation and volubility. One context where such
silence has been reported is ‘Western’ classrooms, especially in mainstream uni-
versity programs and English as a Second Language programs in the US, UK and
Australia. Among such ‘silent Asian’ students are Japanese students, whose silence
in this context has been mentioned frequently in applied linguistics literature. In-
deed, when I set out to identify communicative problems of Japanese native speak-
ers in mainstream courses in Australian universities, it emerged from interviews
with Japanese participants that, instead of ‘ways of speaking,’ ‘not speaking’ was of
their major concern. This led me to observe and analyse interactions (in English)
between Japanese-native speakers and Australian English speakers in university
classrooms, and interview them about their perceptions of silence, in order to see
whether the perception of the stereotypical ‘silent Asians’ does exist, and whether
this perception of stereotype reflects the actual performance.
One of the objectives of this book is to propose an analytical model for inter-
preting silence in intercultural communication. The analytical model is intended
to provide various factors in linguistic, socio-psychological and cognitive domains
at individual, situational, and sociocultural levels of social organisation to con-
sider, in interpreting silence in intercultural communication. By taking such a
multiple-perspective approach, I address the tension between the ‘local’ and the
‘global’ perspectives taken in studies of intercultural communication. In his dis-