Page 29 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

16 Silence in Intercultural Communication

2.4 Silence in multicultural classroom contexts

Studies in multicultural classroom settings have shown students from minority
ethnic groups being silent in the classroom, in comparison with their majority
peers. According to Jaworski & Sachdev (1998), “research has previously suggest-
ed that the multiethnic and multilinguistic educational environment is strongly
associated with a ‘culture of silence’”(p. 276). In his ethnographic study of Sioux
and Cherokee students, Dumont (1972) found that these students’ silence in the
classroom was a consequence of conflicts based on cultural differences. In both
Sioux and Cherokee societies, community members are not used to the “highly
individualized atmosphere of the classroom” (ibid.: 362), and being singled out
for a response repeatedly by the teachers brings only silence from the children.
Similarly, Philips (1972, 1983) explains the silence of children from Warm Springs
Indian communities in central Oregon as a way of coping with cultural differ-
ences – between the Warm Springs culture and the mainstream white American
one – in the classroom. She further explains that because learning takes place
predominantly through the visual channel in Warm Springs communities, Indian
children face difficulties in learning by trial and error through verbal performance
in mainstream classrooms.
Biggs & Edwards (1993) approach silence in the multicultural classroom from
a different perspective. They used a combination of ethnographic approaches and
quantitative analysis of recorded classroom interaction, and found that teachers
interact with black children much less frequently and for a shorter duration than
with white children. When the frequency of initiation by children was examined,
there were no obvious differences. The authors show, with further support of
qualitative data, that the silence of black children is derived from racial prejudice
and discrimination. Similar findings are reported by Ortiz (1988, cited in Losey
1997) who found that Mexican American students are called on 21% less fre-
quently than their Anglo-American peers in American mainstream classrooms.
The explanation was that the teachers preferred to avoid embarrassing students
for their poor English or feeling embarrassed themselves if any miscommunica-
tion occurs. Here we see the use of silence as politeness strategies in intercultural
communication.
While most of these studies on silence in the multicultural classroom focused
on primary school classrooms, Losey (1997) looked at the silence of Mexican
American adult college students. In her study of an English composition classroom
at a college, she found that the overall participation hierarchy was Anglo-Ameri-
can males followed by Anglo-American females, and then Mexican American
males followed by Mexican-American females after a significant gap. Losey (1997)
gives negative self-perception as a powerless and silenced minority compounded