Page 83 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

70 Silence in Intercultural Communication

of perceptions and performance in the construction of silence will be demon-
strated in Chapter 5, through the analysis and discussion of empirical data from
three classroom case studies. In this Chapter, I begin by introducing the methods
I used to investigate perceptions about silence in intercultural communication. I
then discuss the types of silence which emerged from the data.

4.1.1 Speaking about silence: Ethnographic interviews

Nineteen Japanese students from two Australian universities in the Sydney area
were interviewed twice in relation to classroom communication over a period
of four months in 1999. In most cases, the students were interviewed individu-
ally, but on eight occasions focus group interviews were organised. (On the focus
group interviews, see below.) The semi-structured interview questions focused
substantively on eliciting the students’ behaviours and communication styles in
lectures and tutorials, but there were diversions and expansions where students
displayed strong concern. (The original interview schedule can be found in Ap-
pendix 1.) All interviews with the Japanese students were conducted in and later
transcribed into Japanese. However, the interview comments which appear in this
book are given in their English translations (translated by the author).
Among the participants, seven of the female students were enrolled in pro-
grams in the Faculty of Arts, three others were in Science, Commerce, or Educa-
tion. The majors of the male students were slightly more varied, three coming
from Arts, two from Industrial Design, one from Education, one from Engineer-
ing, one from Commerce and one from Chemistry. This distribution of the par-
ticipants’ majors, concentrated in the humanities, reflects the distribution of the
whole population of Japanese students enrolled at these two universities. Two of
the male and two of the female students were enrolled in postgraduate degree
programs. The students’ length of stay in Australia varied from one to ten years.
Two of the male students had come to Australia with their parents as migrants
and had gone to local mainstream schools, and two of the male and four of the
female students received Australian mainstream secondary education for three
years before they entered university. Table 4.1 and 4.2 show participant back-
ground information. More detailed biographical information on the participants
can be found in Appendix 2.
Focus group interviews, which combined two participants from the above
group of Japanese students, were organised on eight out of thirty interview ses-
sions. In all focus group interviews, the two participants knew each other as
friends or classmates. The style of interview was again semi-structured with the
same set of questions used for the individual interview, but the researcher took