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208 Silence in Intercultural Communication

tive investigation of the non-native and native speaker dimension, through an
analysis of Australian students’ behaviour in classroom interaction in Japanese as
a second language, as in Harumi’s (1999) research, would have provided valuable
insight. In fact, many studies, including my own research presented here, deal
with the silence of non-English speaking groups in comparison with the ‘norm’ of
English native/first language speakers. A move, in future research into silence in
intercultural communication, towards contexts in which the focus and the norm
of communication is not always assumed to be ‘talk’, can take our understand-
ing of silence further. At the same time, silence in and across a greater variety of
speech communities needs to be studied, particularly from empirical perspec-
tives. Nevertheless, I hope this book makes a small contribution towards a better
understanding of silence, not solely as a background to talk but as an essential
aspect of human communication.