ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how silence among some students functions in situations where other students talk, based on empirical data from postgraduate Japanese student's experience with communication in English in the Australian educational context. This choice of context is based on researcher's expertise and interest in working with Japanese students in an Australian university. The chapter investigates Japanese student's perceptions, attitudes and experiences in relation to the use of silence in the classroom, whether as an academic learning mode or as an inherent social behaviour. Two major findings from the empirical data are reported and discussed in relation to relevant discourse, primarily among Japanese and non-Western scholars. The reason for this choice of discourse type is to construct an alternative view that might be less common in the current, general literature. To understand Japanese educational silence, author found it useful to look into theoretical resources developed by Japanese scholars who are familiar with the context of their own silence.
