Silence and politeness in intercultural communication in university seminars

This paper examines naturally-occurring university seminar interactions1 in Australia and reports an analysis of the politeness orientation of participants with Japanese and Australian backgrounds in relation to speech and silence. Although the silence of students from Asia, attending universities in countries such as the US, UK and Australia, has been discussed extensively in the literature, empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are still scarce. This paper aims to explain such phenomena, using participant interviews, classroom observation and detailed discourse analysis of classroom interaction. While silence was commonly used by Japanese students to save face, verbal strategies were more common among Australian students. The extensive use of face-saving silences by Japanese students was found to be negatively evaluated by Australian lecturers whose response strategies, while meant to avoid imposition on Japanese students, also resulted in lack of rapport. However, the study also finds that silence may be negotiated when shifts occur in the participants’ perceptions about the footing of their own and/or their interactants.