Page 31 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

18 Silence in Intercultural Communication

and student performance, but also reveals that there are differences in commu-
nity-specific expectations about ‘wait-time’ which may affect teacher and student
performances in multicultural classrooms. In a monocultural classroom setting,
Rowe (1974) also reported how increasing in ‘wait-time’ affected the student per-
formances. Similarly, positive outcomes of utilising silence in EFL classrooms in
Japan were shown by La Forge (1983). He argues that social and cultural silences
among Japanese students can be used facilitatively in learning a foreign language.
In his approach, teachers adopt cultural silence, as the “leader in Japanese society
tends to be a silent person” (p. 79). Students are given more time for their speak-
ing, and are given time to reflect on their silence in the classroom, putting their
reflection in a written form, which receives feedback from the teacher. A facilita-
tive role for silence in learning was also reported by Muchinsky (1985, cited in
Jaworski 1993) in Polish high school language classrooms.
At this point, it is important to note that, in most of the studies in silence in
the multicultural classroom discussed in English, the mainstream group is An-
glo-Saxon, and silence is viewed negatively. It should be mentioned here that in
all these classroom studies, the majority group seems to be English-speaking An-
glo-Saxons. Little is known about whether Anglo-Saxon students as a minority
group would be more silent than non-Anglo majority peers, in situations such
as American students in a Japanese-speaking school in Japan. It should also be
noted that silence as a problem in the classroom has emerged as approaches to
teaching which emphasise critical thinking and interactive modes of learning
have been foregrounded. In traditional teacher-centred teaching methodology,
silence would be unmarked but volubility would be negatively regarded. In Mat-
suda’s (2000) report on teaching approaches in Australian classrooms, Australian
teachers commented that, when they were students, they normally sat quietly and
listened to the teacher most of the time: valuation of talk and silence in the same
context may change historically.

2.5 Silence of overseas students from Asia
in the Anglo-mainstream classroom

This section discusses previous research on the silence of Asian overseas students
in mainstream classrooms of countries such as the UK, the US and Australia. The
reasons that a separate discussion is given for this particular type of student are
firstly, that my studies discussed in this book focuses on the silence of Japanese stu-
dents studying overseas, and secondly, that this particular area of study seems to
be treated differently from ethnographic studies in schools and in minority com-
munities such as those discussed in the previous section. Put another way, such