Page 184 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 5. Performance and perceptions of silence 171

teacher was the absolute authority. This in turn was perceived by Dr. Lucas as Aya
distancing herself and lacking in involvement.
Another important factor in relation to Aya’s different politeness orientations
and silence is the topic. Australian Education was the subject of Dr. Lucas’ course,
while Dr. Riley’s was Japanese Linguistics. As a native speaker of Japanese, the ap-
proach Aya took in the latter course was that of an expert user of the language in
question who was unlikely to say anything wrong. Because she was clearly informed
on the topic, she was less likely to receive disagreement or criticism. In contrast, in
the course in Australian Education among Australian students, she was in a posi-
tion of ‘apprentice.’ This position of being less informed than other students entails
a higher risk of saying something wrong or receiving negative feedback.
The analyses of the empirical data above seem to show that the use of polite-
ness strategies is negotiated in each unique classroom context. In each situation,
both students and lecturers engage in assessing threats to their own faces as well
as to others, and silence is constructed as a result of the interaction of these as-
sessments.

5.5.6 Summary

In this section, the often negatively viewed silence of Japanese students was ana-
lysed in the framework of politeness. A possible transfer of customary silence use
from Japanese classroom practices into Australian university classrooms emerged.
Such use of silence was found to be ambiguous, problematic or face-threatening
for Australian lecturers. It was argued that as a consequence, gaps in politeness
orientations represented in talk and silence may lead to sociopragmatic failure.
The negotiable nature of silence, talk and politeness was also demonstrated.

5.6 Cognitive factors contributing to silence

5.6.1 Speed of reaction

As we saw in Chapter 4, Japanese interviewees found the limited time allowed
to interpret, think and react to the preceding comment or question in discus-
sion problematic. There seem to be multiple factors contributing to this problem.
These include a lack of proficiency in English leading to a longer time required
for decoding the previous speaker’s utterance and for producing coherent and
grammatical English sentences; a lack of familiarity with the timing of turn-tak-
ing by Australian participants leading to difficulty in participation; and a lack of