Paper short abstract:

Being silent is a way of participation, which is often undervalued in language classes despite its potential value for democratic culture. Using an MA Japanese course at an Italian university, the author will explore how the silence was perceived and discuss why valuing silence is challenging.

Paper long abstract:

Being silent is a way of participation, which this study explores. Now, silence is understood as highly complex, dynamic and context-dependent (King 2013). By legitimatising participants at the periphery, legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger 1991) offers a unique perspective to explore silent participation. Drawing upon the perspective, Morita emphasises that silent students in classrooms can be "engaged with many cognitive, affective, and social activities" (2004, p. 596). Further, silence appears inevitable to perform "skills of listening and observing" that Council of Europe (2016) underlines as a key competence for democratic culture. Nevertheless, undervaluing silence and welcoming overt activeness is still common (Lamb 2013) in the communicative approach era and thereafter (Muto 2013). Understanding how silence is undervalued may lead to valuing the silence and hearing the voices of the silenced. Yet, studies of silence are still scarce especially in Japanese language education in Europe.

Thus, this qualitative case study scrutinises silence observed and interpreted by members in an Italian university MA Japanese course. The course emphasised student self-discovery through dialogue. All members, including eleven MA students, seven facilitators who assisted the students with more familiarity with dialogic pedagogy and the teacher were expected to engage in active oral exchanges throughout the 15 week semester. Using thematic analysis (Nowel et al. 2017), the author explored and triangulated (Flick 2007) observation with video-recordings, the audio-recording of in-group conversations, facilitators' observation notes and student writings to attain holistic understanding of the silence.

The analysis found that silence observed and reported over the semester was often negatively regarded by the members as previously discussed (Lamb 2013) e.g. lack of willingness to think, less degree of interests in other members, low motivation for active engagement, lack of proficiency in Japanese and/or fear of being judged. This study suggests that such an interpretation of silence is influenced by dialogic pedagogy. Intriguingly, the silence was seen as not a group but individual matter. This study concludes by discussing why valuing silence is challenging in classrooms and thus how attempting to recognise its value is crucial for fostering democratic culture in classrooms and then society.