Page 38 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 25

Pause length is apparently one of the major concerns for EFL teachers in their
interaction with Japanese students, and again cultural awareness and adaptation
is made, as we can find in Thorp (1991):

[...] I did adapt to Japanese ideas concerning what was an acceptable pause length
between speaker turns, and between question and answer. I soon realized that the
Japanese have a far greater tolerance of silence than the British do, and I adapted
to this. (p. 114)
While the understanding of ‘culturally appropriate’ silence is important in lan-
guage teaching, it is also dangerous to rely on cultural differences in interpreting
silence because the role of language difficulty and psychological factors such as
lack of confidence and embarrassment in speaking English are ignored in inter-
preting Japanese students’ silence. Lawrie (2002) also reports that native speaker
EFL teachers find the silence of Japanese students problematic, but she found that
rather than lengths of pauses, location of pauses was likely to affect Japanese stu-
dents’ silence particularly as their pauses tend to occur around the beginning or
end of their turns rather than in the middle. One of the issues which arises from
these observations by researchers in intercultural communication as well as in
EFL/TESOL is whether empirical evidence can be found to show that Japanese
native speakers’ length of inter-turn pauses in their native language is relatively
longer than that of English native speakers in theirs. Another issue to be addressed
is whether the reported ‘longer pauses’ and ‘slow tempo of speech’ are results of a
transfer of communicative style from L1 to L2 or due to language difficulties in L2
(cf. Lucas 1984; Neustupný 1985), or something else.
Regarding the timing of turn-taking by Japanese students learning English,
Carroll (2000) reports that his Japanese students “are sensitive to and capable of,
at least on occasion, precisely timing their entry into talk” (p. 77) when they in-
teract in English, although the students are novice learners of English and their
interaction shows more frequent gaps than in native speaker interaction. Fur-
thermore, some extensive gaps occurred due to the students’ orientation to avoid
premature overlaps over dysfluently produced turns. These findings suggest that
Japanese speakers who are more proficient speakers of English as a second lan-
guage would be capable of managing timing of turn-taking with an orientation
to ‘no gap, no overlap.’ However, since Carroll’s (2000) study examined interac-
tion among Japanese students who were all non-native speakers, management
of precision timing in interaction between non-native and native speakers may
show different patterns. Murata (1994) shows, nevertheless, that Japanese stu-
dents who are more proficient in English than in Carroll’s (2000) study seem to
interrupt more often in English conversation than in Japanese. This suggests that
despite the fact that Murata (1994) found much less interruption in talk between