Page 96 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 4. Perceptions of silence 83

often found to be silent in open discussions, as can be seen in a comment such as
“Often silent when other students engage in discussion.”
Lecturers also found Japanese students to be “reluctant to ask questions” in
class, and this reluctance to ask questions were seen as marked. Occasionally, a
surprise was expressed at the quality of the students’ written work or thoughtful
responses when they were nominated to speak:

(25) Some students are quiet, and don’t speak much in class but write very good
essays when they have time to think and compose their sentences on paper.
[LQ5]

(26) Sometimes they are reluctant to ask questions, but when asked for a response
they are thoughtful in their answer. [LQ8]
As the use of the conjunction “but” above implies, these qualities are seen as con-
tradictory: ‘silent’ students versus ‘thoughtful answers’ and ‘good essays’.
Australian lecturers appear to regard oral performance in class as an impor-
tant criterion for academic competence. They expect students to ask questions
and be interactive in participation structures such as open class discussion (4) or
lectures (7) where the pressure to speak is relatively low. The underlying assump-
tion seems to be that the more interaction there is in class, the better the learning
which takes place. If there are silent students, they are seen to hinder the effective-
ness of this learning-through-interaction. Indeed, some Japanese students com-
plained that they felt misjudged by lecturers as incompetent precisely because of
their silence (see Section 4.4.2 below).
With regard to the participation structure in which the teacher nominates a
student for a response (1), Japanese students were not regarded as silent. When
students were nominated, “thoughtful answers” were heard, as the comment above
shows. A lecturer also stated that although Japanese students do not participate
voluntarily, when nominated, they “are very good, giving lots of interesting com-
ments, and sometimes they even joke.”
As these lecturer responses demonstrate, perceptions about patterns of Japa-
nese student silence and participation seem to be shared by Japanese students
and Australian lecturers. In the following section of this chapter, I will discuss
socio-psychological factors contributing to silence, examining lack of participa-
tion from the perspective of politeness theory.