Over the Wall of Silence

Introduction 7

at a Japanese university. It’s a huge part of their culture shock- something that all teachers experience, most carry with them as a kind of trauma, but few talk about with others. We’re all supposed to be professionals, right? But it does happen, and we all have to deal with it somehow. In this book, we’ll try to explain our view on why things like the wall of silence come about in a classroom, and give some constructive ideas about how to deal with them. C ULTURE AND THE SPEAKING CLASSROOM As we all know, culture is extremely complicated. It could be de scribed as a very powerful river of tradition, socialization and history. And it’s actually quite difficult to recognize, let alone analyze. But don’t worry. We’re not going to bash anyone over the head with theory. When we use the word culture here, we only want to talk about how it affects the here and now, and from a strictly practical angle. We want to look only at how the ways in which people think, behave and communicate can unconsciously affect the foreign lan guage classroom in Japan. However, we will have to use some generalizations which will be, by definition, partly incomplete. So, rather than describing cultural features in exhaustive detail, we will (1) focus on what they mean, in terms of actual, observable behavior, (2) describe strategies to deal with problems that arise from this and (3) explain why those strate gies are effective. Of course, we don’t aim to put labels on people, nor to appear condescending towards Japanese culture. We have both been drawn to Japan, chosen to settle down in this country, and started bicultural families. We love and respect Japanese culture (but of course we are also frustrated by it at times!). You won’t find any judgements here, just a practical concern that comes from direct experience.