Page 89 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

76 Silence in Intercultural Communication

There is also an interface case between the sociolinguistic clash and general
social rules of interaction. The following comment expresses a Japanese student’s
discomfort with interrupting.

(11) You know, I cannot volunteer, and on top of that, interrupt when someone’s
talking. It’s like, offensive, or what can I say, I feel I have to wait until someone
finishes talking before I speak. I feel I shouldn’t interrupt. [28:39 F3]

The same student expressed her difficulty in keeping up with the Australian stu-
dents’ speed of turn-taking. Thus, both Japanese social etiquette and differences
in norms of turn-taking can be at work. As Tannen (1985) argues in her study of
different communicative styles, fast-rate speech with frequent overlapping talk
can be a sign of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘solidarity’ for some while for others it can be
regarded as ‘interrupting’ and as a sign of ‘rudeness’ or ‘lack of attention’.
At this point, let us turn to lecturers’ perceptions. Little reference to the speed
of speech and turn-taking was made in their questionnaire responses. However,
there was one comment which implied that Japanese students have difficulty with
the rapidity of interaction in classroom discussions:

(12) Japanese students sometimes find it hard to adapt to the more critical,
analytical, argumentative style of social science here, and to the cut and thrust
of classroom discussions. [LQ34]

What was expressed as “bullets are shooting” by a Japanese student can be re-
phrased as “the cut and thrust of classroom discussions” in the lecturer’s comment
above. This lecturer also mentioned that “their English is often better than students
from other Asian non-English speaking countries.” However, no other lecturer re-
ferred to this sociolinguistic aspect of classroom discussion which may leave Japa-
nese students feeling ‘left out’ in classroom discussion and thus ‘silenced.’

4.2.3 Participant structures

One dimension of perceptions about silence which emerged from the student in-
terviews is the way in which participation is structured in classroom communica-
tion. Japanese student orientations towards verbal participation vary depending
on how a communicative activity is organised and how much contribution is ex-
pected at a certain point in the class. Philips’ (1972, 1983) concept of ‘participant
structures’, developed in her studies of children from Warm Springs Indian com-
munity, enabled her to identify reasons for their problematic silence in classroom
communication. Participant structures are “structural arrangements of interac-
tion” or “ways of arranging verbal interaction” (Philips 1972: 377). Through care-