Cultural Silence Cultural Communication Patterns example essay topic

Introduction: This paper analyzes the nature of silence, the possible meaning of it, and the reasons for the different understanding of it in intercultural communication. At the end of the paper, some suggestions are given for successful understanding of it. It is the author's intention that this knowledge can facilitate effective intercultural communication. Silence, as one of the means of non-verbal communication, is also called "quiet time? In almost any language, we can find evidences to show importance people attach to it: in English, we have a proverb? speech is silver, and silence is golden.?

In Chinese, we have? silence is better than speech.? (c ishi wu sheng sheng you sheng). However, in actual communication, the significance of silence is largely ignored or, to make things worse, it is misunderstood partly because of the uncertain relationship between the signifier and the signified, since, in essence, silence is a sign. It is especially true in intercultural communication where different people's cultural value conflicts. Therefore, it is highly necessary to better our understanding of it to achieve effective communication. Nature of Silence As I have emphasized, silence is not an interruption of communication, rather, it is a means of communication and it is a language. Broadly speaking, according to Kwal and Gamble, it can be classified into seven categories: 1) body language or kinetics (facial expressions, posture, eye gaze and eye contact, and gestures); 2) clothing and artifactual communication; 3) voice or para language (including pitch, volume, rate and pauses); 4) space and distance, or proxemic factors (including both the space that exists between us when we talk to each other and the way we organize space in our homes, offices, and communities); 5) color; 6) time, or chronemics; 7) touch, or haptic's.

Therefore, silence is multichannel. However, since it covers too much scope, this paper only deals with one kind of silence, the nonvocal one. Functions of Silence Silence can be classified into three groups according to its different functions according to Bruneau. 1) Psycholinguistic Silence -- -- Both, speaker and listener of speech need to gain time to construct mental thoughts into proper words and grammatical forms, or to interpret the message. This is often done by hesitations which are forms of silence (Bruneau, 1979: p 312). For example, in an interview, the interviewee is generally given some time to think before's / he is asked to answer the questions.

Therefore, they include psychological activities. Since generally speaking, if people take some time to think about the question before answering it, it also shows that the speakers are quite serious with it, therefore, it is also employed by tactful speakers. However, it does not contain a potential source of misunderstanding in an intercultural conversation as it only describes cognitive processes and has no differences among people involved and the length of this silence largely depends on the length of sentences and the complexity of the topic. The longer the sentence is, the more complex the topic is, the longer the silence or hesitation is. 2) interactive silences -- - they are pau sal interruptions in a conversation and which tend to be longer than hesitations.

Bruneau noted that "interactive silences differ from psycholinguistic silence mainly in each participant's conscious recognition of the degree and manner in which he is expected to participate in communicative exchange". (1979: p 315). A long interactive silence can signify that one is careful or has an emotionally close relationship with his or her counterpart or, he wants to diverse the topic or information. Moreover interactive silence can express deep emotions and it is used as a form of social control. For example, in order to give others a big surprise, we may, before telling others the good news, just say: "say what, I have a piece of good news to tell you.?

And then, simply keep silent for a short while. In public speeches and in classroom teaching, it is a well-employed technique to achieve user's various goals. For example, in order to attract the attention of some noisy students in the classroom, teachers may not need to raise their voices to compete with them, instead, they may suddenly keep silent, and the noisy students, since they don't know what happens, will immediately stop talking. Interactive silence can be problematic in intercultural communication, since different culture has difference tolerance of hesitation. Generally speaking, eastern countries have more tolerance of it.

Therefore, when westerners communicate with easterners, they need to be very careful not to interrupt them. The following case may help illustrate this. Athabaskans accept a slightly longer pause between sentences than do English speakers. When an English speaker has finished a sentence he expects the Athabaskan to take the burden of speak within a certain time. Due to different systems of pausing between turns, the Athabaskan would reply later than the English expects. The English might think that his interlocutor does not want to speak and feels free to continue.

But at the same time, the Athabaskan has just been waiting his regular length of time before answering in order not to interrupt the speaker. If the conversation continues this way, the Athabaskan will not be able to start talking or to make any comments while the English speaker goes on and on. The conversation seems to be for both sides rather unsatisfying. It can moreover lead to negative assumptions by the interlocutors. The Athabaskan might think that the English speaker just wants to present his point of view and that he is not interested in the other one. In contrast the English speaker could assume that the Athabaskan is not interested in his opinion or, even worse, that he is not able to follow him intellectually.

A similar situation can occur when the Athabaskan intends to say a series of sentences. After having finished the first one, he will wait his regular length of time before continuing. The English speaker will now most likely interrupt him because he thinks that the Athabaskan has finished due to the length of the pause. In this context, the English speaker might feel that the Athabaskan cannot pronounce a whole coherent idea and vice versa the Athabaskan feels interrupted and not being able to say what he intended to say. 3). Socio-cultural silence -- -Cultural communication patterns include not only rules concerning the use of verbal expressions but determine also situations in which entire social and cultural orders select silence in order to express their intentions or feelings.

Socio-cultural silence may help understanding cultural communication patterns much better than spoken words. Basso stated that " an adequate ethnography of communication should not confine itself exclusively to the analysis of choice within the verbal repertoires. It should also (... ) specify those conditions under which the members of the society regularly decide to refrain from verbal behavior altogether". (Basso, 1990: p 305) From the above definition, we therefore come to realize that interactive silence and psycholinguistic silence are more or less international. (The difference between interactive silence and psycholinguistic silence is that, the former refers to the silence when speaker knows what he is going to talk about, while the latter refers the silence when speaker is thinking what he is going to talk about. The former is done strategically, while the latter is done obliged ly.) However, socio-cultural silence is more culture-bond and specific.

It is a major potential cause of misunderstanding or breakdown in intercultural communication since cultural norms that guide communication are very different and they influence people subconsciously. In the following part, we then, take a good look at this factor. First, we are going to be familiar with the meaning of silence in some cultural communities.