Page 66 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 3. The sociocultural context 53

Although in both schools teachers and students interacted in a spontaneous
and informal manner outside class, such as when students spoke individually with
teachers in the teachers’ room or in the corridors, in the official and public learning
processes in the classroom, the spontaneity and informality disappear. In terms of
different types of pedagogy, roughly half of the teachers had a more authoritarian,
teacher-centred, chalk-and-talk teaching style, while half had a more interactive
teaching style, and were often seen encouraging students to participate. Generally,
the latter group tend to have better rapport with students, are often followed and
surrounded by a small group of students before or after the class, and also interact
in a less formal manner than the teachers in the former group during the class.
However, whether taught by the traditional teachers or the more interactive ones,
students were generally found to be inattentive and bored, reading comics, sleep-
ing with their heads in their arms on the desk, or having a quiet chat with class-
mates. Students sleeping in class were usually ignored and not reproached.
These ‘rude’ behaviours of Japanese students invoke doubts about the ‘hierar-
chical’ relationship between teachers and students. Instead, the teachers’ indiffer-
ence (at least on the surface) to these student behaviours, as well as the students’
apparent lack of motivation to engage in lessons, could be seen as a lack of rap-
port or even communication breakdown. However, coherent learning processes
and teachers’ authority seem to be maintained through the written mode of com-
munication (e.g. note-taking, handouts and written assignments), which has a
pivotal role in learning in Japan (cf. Section 3.2.1 above).

3.3.2 Politeness and face-work in the classroom

Let us now look into how the social dynamics of the classroom are intertwined
with the way communication takes place there, especially in terms of politeness,
face-work and the talk-silence continuum. The hierarchical relationship between
the teacher and students which is claimed to characterise Japanese classroom
practice (Kato 2001; Yoneyama 1999, see also Hofstede 1980) would possibly be
reflected in deference and formality marked by polite sentence endings or honor-
ific expressions (for politeness and stylistic variation in Japanese, see e.g. Ide 1989;
Loveday 1986; Matsumoto 1988). However, my observations at the Japanese high
schools did not totally support this hypothesis, and instead, the concept of uchi
and soto – in-group and out-group – seemed to explain politeness and communi-
cation more appropriately than hierarchy. Distinction between the uchi and soto
mode of communication is one of the distinctive characteristics of communica-
tion in Japanese (for detailed accounts of uchi and soto in Japanese society, see
Clancy 1986; Loveday 1986; Moeran 1988). In in-group (uchi) communication,