Page 43 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

30 Silence in Intercultural Communication

tation of silent responses elicited from both Japanese native speakers and English
native speakers, it is claimed that their non-verbal expressions accompanying si-
lence were not “clear enough” to communicate their intention and “problematic”
(p. 182). However, the instances of silent responses examined are limited to two
cases for each group, and further studies such as Harumi’s (1999) of a larger scale
are required. As argued by Sajavaara & Lehtonen (1997) as well as Scollon (1985),
for some communities, silence can serve communicative/social functions which,
in others, can be realised and performed by speech. It is worth referring again to
Sifianou’s statement (1997: 68), that it is the interaction of talk and silence which
gives meaning to each.

2.7. Summary: An overview of silence in intercultural communication

In the above sections of this chapter, an overview of existing research into silence
in communication has been given. Section 2.2 discussed the various forms, func-
tions and meanings of silence which have been studied mostly in applied linguis-
tics but also in social psychology and anthropology. The range of phenomena
which studies of silence in communication cover is wide, and the functions and
meanings of silence are so versatile it appears that silence performs as many com-
municative roles as does speech. On the other hand, there is a general view that
interpreting silence involves difficulties as well as a greater amount of inferential
effort due to the ambiguous and context-dependent nature of silence. Therefore,
the benefit of an ethnographic approach to capture this complex and subtle nature
of silence was apparent (see Chapter 5 for further details on the use of ethnogra-
phy in the present research).
The ambiguity and context-dependency of silence were described as sources
of problems in intercultural communication. With regard to the context of com-
munication, however, it mostly involved English native speakers of Anglo-Saxon
background who negatively perceived the silence of their interlocutors from other
cultural backgrounds. Then, positive and negative aspects of silence in multicul-
tural classroom contexts were discussed. The silence of ethnic minority students
was often found to be a consequence of silencing by classroom participants from
mainstream cultural groups and was suggested to be a mark of powerlessness and
oppression. On the other hand, the silence of Asian overseas students has been
treated in the literature as an intercultural problem and cultural differences have
been predominantly given as explanations for the ‘problem.’ This was critically
discussed because of the tendency to propose an East-West dichotomy rather
than empirically scrutinising the complex structure of silence.