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Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 19

students are not ‘ethnic minorities’ who have settled in these countries but ‘so-
journers’ who have come to these countries motivated by academic aspirations.
Students from Asia are often described as ‘reticent,’ ‘quiet’ or ‘silent’ in fields
such as TESOL (e.g. Kubota 1999; Young 1990), English for Academic Purposes
(e.g. Adams et al. 1991; Jones 1999; Thorp 1991), higher education (e.g. Ballard
1996; Ballard & Clanchy 1991; Liu 2000) or intercultural studies (e.g. Marriott
2000; Milner & Quilty 1996). Most of these studies explore why Asian students
are silent, or ‘reticent,’ and how this ‘problem’ can be improved. To address these
issues, research methods such as interviews, questionnaires and observations have
generally been used. Overall, it is predominantly sociocultural factors which have
been discussed as having the strongest impact on the silence of Asian students
(Adams et al. 1991; Jones 1999; Liu 2000, 2002; Thorp 1991) although second lan-
guage anxiety or actual language difficulties are also claimed to be one of the major
causes (Braddock et al. 1995; Volet & Ang 1998). Among the studies mentioned
above, Liu’s study (2000, 2002) is particularly relevant, since the focal issue of his
study is silence of Asian students in American university classrooms. Based on
interview and observation data, Liu (2000) lists five major categories for factors
affecting the participation modes of Asian students: cognitive, pedagogical, affec-
tive, sociocultural and linguistic (p. 163). Among these, sociocultural and affective
factors are claimed to affect participation to the largest extent. The sociocultural
factors are explored in fuller details in Liu (2002) in which cases of three Chinese
students are discussed. Here, silence as a powerful tool for learning and internal
information processing, as well as silence as a sign of respect for the teacher as an
authority, are argued as culturally framed silences among these Chinese students.
A very similar observation is also made in Tatar (2005) about Turkish overseas
students in the US. In Liu (2000), it is also suggested that personality and gender
are related to participation modes in that introverted students and female students
show stronger tendency to remain silent in class, while it is argued that linguistic
factors alone did not predict the level of participation. However, no quantification
of participation or analysis of classroom interaction was presented as empirical
evidence, which is in fact a prevalent weakness of studies in this area.
One of the sociocultural factors affecting Asian students’ silence is their un-
familiarity with the way communication is structured in the classroom, which
brings us back to Philips’ (1972, 1983) study of Warm Springs Indian children
who were socialised into ‘participant structures’ of communication different from
Anglo-American norms. Similarly, Asian overseas students may find it difficult to
adjust themselves to the “free for all” (Thorp 1991: 114) turn-taking system (Bal-
lard & Clanchy 1991; Jones 1999). For instance, Marriott (2000) reports that Japa-
nese postgraduate students in Australia have difficulties participating in tutorials
and seminars because they “had not experienced any tutorial genre in Japan” and