Page 58 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 3. The sociocultural context 45

In some cases his ‘obsession’ with note-making was related to the fact that stu-
dents were required to submit their notebooks to the teacher for assessment and
that the content of the notebooks is what students have to memorise for the ex-
ams. Matsuda (2000) says that in Japanese schools, “many students copy the writ-
ing on the blackboard precisely the same way in details such as colours, lines and
3
grids” (p. 446, my translation). It was also observed that a substantial amount of
teacher-student spoken interaction was likely to occur as a supplement to writ-
ten mode of learning, for instance, when checking the answers for the exercises
on handouts or textbooks. At Tokyo High School, teachers often used handouts,
which usually had multiple-choice exercises, gap-filling exercises, summaries of
the content, and open questions which seemed to serve as pre-exam exercises.
Below is an example of exchange shaped through work on a handout:

(3) [Tokyo High School Class 2 Classical Japanese]
1 Teacher: Number one in Two. Okay, Mr. Suzuki?
2 Suzuki: Number one in Two?
3 Teacher: Eh? Number one in Two.
4 Suzuki: Two.
5 Teacher: Right. It’s Two. Okay then, number two. Mr. Kato.
6 (pause – about 25 seconds)
7 Kato: A.
8 Teacher: Right. It’s A. ((T gives an explanation)). Okay, next.
9 (pause – around 1.0)
10 Kimura: U? [one of the Japanese syllabic characters given as a choice]
11 Teacher: Ummm
12 (pause – around 3.0)
13 Kimura: I? [another Japanese orthography as a choice]
14 Teacher: Which?
15 Kimura: U, is it?
16 Teacher: It’s U. ((gives an explanation))
At Fuji High School, although training for the university entrance exam is not
necessary, the written mode of communication was also more prevalent. In the
Modern Japanese class, for example, a task was given to students to write a short
passage on a topic provided by the teacher. One of the two questions was “Write
your thoughts about the description of the scenery in p. 154 line 15 to p. 155
line two ‘in the attic on the fourth floor... looked like it was at the mercy of the
wind”’. Students’ written work in short paragraphs was made into a collection of

3. Matsuda suggests that these activities reflect a concept of knowledge that is not negotiable,
and where students are expected to accept ‘correct answers’ from the teacher.