Academic Quality Symposium 07-04 December, 5 th , 2007 UNIMAS 6 Silence Students: Asian Culture or Passivity? Charles Bong Hin Joo 1 , Hollena Nori 2 1 Lecturer , Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia bhjcharles@feng.unimas.my 2 Lecturer, Department of Plant Science and Environment Ecology, Faculty of Resource Science and Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia nhollena@frst.unimas.my ABSTRACT Silent response given by students when being posed questions or asking for their opinion on a subject matter is a situation faced by most lecturers when conducting classes, especially with Asian students. Studies carried on the behaviour of Asian students have shown that these groups have different learning styles and method compared to western students. Unlike the western culture, these Asian students are less active in participation during the learning activities in class. This paper will discuss the background of this issue, factors contributing to this issue and finally proposing some of the methods that could be use by lecturers in encouraging students to speak up in class. 1. INTRODUCTION Most lecturers encounter the experience of frustration due to lack of response and long silence from students when questions are being posed to them. As a result, the lecturers themselves have to answer their own questions in order to fix the situation. Another scenario is when the lecturers open the floor for question and answer session but no questions were being asked from the students. Some lecturer relates students’ silence in class with passivity and lack of cooperation. Is this necessary true? Is it a culture for Asian students to remain silence in class? What other factors that contributes to this issue. What can the lecturers do to encourage students to speak up and ask questions? All of these will be discussed in this paper. 2. BACKGROUND OF THE ISSUE In a study done among Chinese students, it was found that these students do not tend to ask as many questions as their western counterpart [1]. According to the Chinese culture, questioning during the learning activities may be viewed as representing a challenge and disrespect to the teacher [2]. This opinion is explained by the Chinese Confucion Heritage Culture, where the teacher is regarded as the most respected master who has all the wisdom and it is impolite to interrupt and asked questions. This aspect is called power distance where the teacher is given great respect and authority in the classroom. However, this culture has created a gap and boundary between the teacher and students, and this has caused the teachers become inaccessible to the students. Having said that, how about other Asian students that are not of Chinese heritage? From Hofstede’s model of cultural differences among societies [3], he categorized Asian students as collectivist, which by definition means that these cultures tend to emphasize the needs of society as a whole, identifying individuals through their membership in a group rather than their position, rank, or personal qualities [4]. When, learning activities are conducted in the classroom, students in collectivistic societies will seldom respond to the lecturers’ questions if the questions are directed to the entire class. They will only speak if called personally, however there are hardly any volunteers when answering questions in the class. Furthermore, these students prefer to work in small rather than large groups. Another contributing factor to this issue is the incompetence of speaking the language of instruction. Asian students may be quiet in class because they are not confident in speaking English language fluently. As a consequence, they may lack self-confidence in expressing themselves and also afraid to ‘lose face’ by exposing their weaknesses. Other justifications associated with silence are because they are shy, does not understand the subject matter, the fear of being attacked back by the lecturer and afraid of being portrayed by other classmates as asking irrelevant and ridiculous questions. It is not fair to look into this issue from the student’s perspectives only. Sometimes, it is the lecturers teaching style that contribute to silence in class. If the lecturer only focus on the subject matter thoroughly and teach without losing time with not much student interaction, students will tend to perceive that the lecturer are not open to opinion and discussion. Consequently, this will lead to a passive classroom environment where students’ creativity and enthusiasm in learning are not manifested. This classroom environment where exam-oriented is over emphasized will create a situation where students have fear of making mistakes which leads to the feeling of low self esteem, therefore they will only dare to express their ideas if they have something brilliant and positive to contribute. As a result, this will produce students that are only concern about the end product or result, where they are expected to learn how to do and not learn how to learn. This is a total opposite concept