Page 85 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

72 Silence in Intercultural Communication

Table 4.3 Participants in focus group interviews

Focus group Participants Number of focus group interviews
1 M2, F8 1
2 M5, M6 1
3 F1, F2 2
4 F3, F4 2
5 F6, F7 2

responses were obtained from four of the six faculties. The low response rate is
most likely due to the small ratio of Japanese students in the whole population of
students at this university (221 of the whole student population of 36,976 in 1999;
that is, 0.6%), as well as the method of questionnaire distribution by bulk email
which is less demanding than a more individual approach. However, considering
the scarcity of Japanese students in faculties such as law or science and the rela-
tively small number of lecturers who had actually had Japanese overseas students
in their classes, the response rate can be considered reasonable. Nevertheless, to
supplement this relatively small scale survey, I will draw on findings from a simi-
lar survey by Braddock et al. (1995) at Macquarie University in Sydney on inter-
national students (lecturer respondents: 39).
The questionnaire included three broad questions: (1) What is your impres-
sion of Japanese students in Australian university classrooms?; (2) What are par-
ticular strengths of Japanese students you perceive in your classes?; (3) What are
particular problems of Japanese students you perceive in your classes? This open-
question style made it possible not only to elicit lecturers’ impressions of Japanese
students in their own words, but also to discover whether, without mentioning the
word ‘silence’ itself, the silence of the Japanese students is perceived as a marked
phenomenon among lecturers. The content and the format of the questionnaire
can be found in Appendix 3.

4.2 Linguistic factors contributing to silence

Following the model introduced in Chapter 2, this chapter accounts for Japanese
student silences based on comments of the Japanese students who participated
in the ethnographic interviews, and on comments made in response to questions
in the lecturer survey, both conducted in Australia. I begin by presenting discus-
sions on factors in the linguistic domain.