Page 61 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

48 Silence in Intercultural Communication

Half of the class time was used for group discussion, with the teacher going
around groups, participating in exchanges of opinions or monitoring them. In
other classes, the learning through the organisation of ‘students versus students’
was also abundantly included. In Japan, there is a tendency to rely on so-called
‘teacher versus students’ style.
(p. 70, my translation, an excerpt from Nichigō Press, January 2001)
In my Japanese high school classroom study, teacher-centred lecturing with oc-
casional questions from the teacher to an individual student was dominant. For
example, in Tokyo High School, although for the Creative Writing class, students’
desks were organised in a seminar style circle, student-student interaction was
not observed in this class except for private ‘chatting.’ The dominance of teacher-
to-student interaction can be seen in Excerpt (3)–(5) below, where, after each
student’s comment, the teacher either asks a question about their work or makes
a comment (lines 2, 8, 10), and then the student responds (lines 3, 9, 12). Then,
the teacher says “hai” (in this case, meaning ‘right’), which appears to function,
along with his eye-gaze, as a boundary marker to indicate a handover of a turn to
the next student (lines 4, 13).

(5) [Tokyo High School Class 1 Creative Writing]
1 Student 1: Um I wanted to become a trainer of killer whale, that’s why I wrote
this.
2 Teacher: Can you show us one of the pages a bit?
3 ((F5 hesitantly shows one of the pages to the class))
4 Teacher: Right. (Hai.) ((gives a cue to the next student by eye contact))
5 Student 2: Um, since I was told to work on the last assignment, I wanted to
6 work on something that’s not too hard, ( ) I was thinking,
7 ( ) it’s not something I can show everyone, so I am sorry.
8 Teacher: You also took the photos yourself?
9 Student 2: Yes.
10 Teacher: The front page, it’s very good. You don’t have to humble yourself so
11 much. Did you hand in first?
12 Student 2: Oh, I guess second.
13 Teacher: Right. (Hai.)

Although students had been given time to look at all other students’ work ear-
lier in the same class, no comments were made by students about other students’
work, and no student-student interaction was observed. The prototypical teacher-
centred classroom interaction of I-R-F (Initiation-Response-Follow-up) structure
(Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) can be frequently observed here. This model, which
involves a pattern of teacher initiating an exchange with a question (I), followed
by a response from a student or students (R) and then a teacher’s follow-up turn