Page 185 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

172 Silence in Intercultural Communication

familiarity with coming up with ideas or organising thoughts in a short period of
time. The first two of these were observed in the case studies to some degree, as
discussed earlier. The last has not been discussed in detail, and will be addressed
below with data from the case studies. Among the three Japanese participants,
Miki explicitly mentioned the difficulty she faced when asked for an opinion, dur-
ing one of the lectures:

(63) [Interaction: Miki]

45 Miki: when I (0.3) when I am asked to: (0.2) give
46 my own opinion,(0.3) I have to take some
47 time to think (0.5) what my opinion is,
48 (0.3) why I (do) this (0.7) argument,
49 cause (0.6) even when I was writing (0.3)
50 something in Japan for school (0.2) work for
51 homework, (0.4) I wasn’t asked to: (.) give
52 (0.3) my opinion. (0.2) I just (0.2) could
53 get something from the book what it
54 says, (0.8) a:nd um I could say (0.5) I
55 (0.2) will agree or I will not agree, but
56 I couldn’t give much of my opinion why I
57 agree or why I don’t agree.(0.8).
She reiterates this problem in her interview:

(64) [Interview: Miki]
Miki: […] when I am asked “What do you think?” I need some time to think
about it. I don’t come up with an idea straight away. So on balance, something
like, you can take your own time, for example letters or email, for those things
I can say quite a lot.

Miki’s perceptions of this particular problem resonate with comments by some
of the Japanese interviewees (see Chapter 4). With regards to Tadashi and Aya,
however, no explicit comments were made about silence due to the time required
for organising thoughts. In fact, this is the most difficult aspect of investigation
into silence in communication – researchers often have to depend on self-reports
of the participants to analyse intentions and interpretations of silence (Jaworski
& Stephens 1988).
In Aya’s case, it seems that she is more accustomed, when asked to give her
opinion, to verbalise her thoughts, rather than allowing a long silent pause: