Page 99 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

86 Silence in Intercultural Communication

In all social encounters, as Goffman (1955) argues, human beings do ‘face-
work’ to avoid the loss face. Thus, one would also expect Australian students to
experience risk in voluntary participation, although they are unlikely to suffer
from a fear of producing incorrect English sentences. However, silence as a face-
saving strategy does not seem to be common among Australian students. Instead,
there were comments by Japanese students about Australian students speaking
without fear:

(31) F8: They don’t keep it to themselves, I think. Like, it’s a bit of an idea, and it’s
not a big deal.
M2: I think they just put their thoughts into words and speak straight away.
And they don’t think they are silly. Or, they are not wrong, and it’s not
like they don’t want to feel embarrassed [23:265-66 F8&M2]

(32) M2: Not so many Australians are shy, I think […] compared with Asian
people who are shy, they are somehow totally different […] even if they
are shy, they would give their opinions. [23:353-356, M2&F8]

For these Japanese students, volunteering “a bit of an idea” is in fact “a big deal”
and they “don’t want to feel embarrassed” by saying something wrong.
One way to explain this gap is differences in the schema and interpretive
frames. Schema is a notion originally discussed by Bartlett (1932), and has been
used extensively in discourse analysis. (for example, Gumperz 1982; Roberts &
Sayers 1987; Tannen 1993a). It is “a set of knowledge and belief structures” which
has been accumulated through our past experiences and which scaffolds as-
sumptions about our social interaction (Roberts & Sayers 1987: 115). Interpretive
frame, a notion developed by Bateson (1972) is a set of expectations about types
of roles and activities on which interactants rely to interpret what is going on,
and in order to react accordingly. These notions of schema and interpretive frame
have been particularly useful in analyzing intercultural discourse (Gumperz 1992;
Tannen 1993a; Tyler 1995), where differences in schemata and interpretive frames
have often been found to trigger miscommunication or misunderstanding.
In the context of the present study, therefore, different assumptions and be-
liefs about education, and different expectations concerning appropriate behav-
iour in the classroom, may lead to cross-cultural clashes. The Japanese students’
references to ‘wrong’ English in the answers shown above seem to reflect the edu-
cational practices and ideology of Japanese schooling, where correctness of the
end product is valued over the process of learning, such as classroom discussion
(e.g. Ballard & Clanchy 1991; Kato 2001; Milner & Quilty 1996; Yoneyama 1999).
Japanese students appear to have different criteria for relevance and correctness
of student comments in the classroom, and hence frame classroom participation