Abstract
Much has been said about Japanese students’ reticence in classrooms (e.g., Anderson, 1993; Korst, 1997), a feature that has been associated with Japanese (or more broadly Asian) cultural characteristics (Ferris & Tagg, 1996; Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Littlewood, 1999). With regard to second and foreign language learning, Japanese EFL learners’ silence tends to be seen as a serious problem that interferes with the L2 acquisition process when successful learning requires a great deal of oral interaction in the language (Izumi, 2003; Swain, 2005). However, empirical studies have not accumulated enough evidence to verify these allegations. This has led some researchers to dispute the claim, criticising the attribution of reticence to cultural characteristics as overgeneralisation and stereotyping (Cheng, 2000; Kubota, 1999).
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© 2016 Tomoko Yashima, Maiko Ikeda and Satomi Nakahira
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Yashima, T., Ikeda, M., Nakahira, S. (2016). Talk and Silence in an EFL Classroom: Interplay of Learners and Context. In: King, J. (eds) The Dynamic Interplay between Context and the Language Learner. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457134_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457134_7
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