SLA: Knowing Learners through Autobiography & Memoirs

How - and what - can educators, specifically second-language teachers, come to know about their students and those students' needs? Perhaps, given the complexity of silence in second language acquisition, and the complexity of desire and ambivalence in learners, and the further complexity of the lives and the work of educators, such direct knowledge is not possible. And this gives rise to other questions. How can we learn to live with this lack of direct knowledge? How can education tolerate the partiality of what it can know?

If I am, perhaps, a little less hopeful than Riley (1999: 10) about the possibility of obtaining 'a clear idea' of the language learner's identity from the learner himself or herself, I am nevertheless convinced that, despite or even through silence, ways can be found into relations between teachers and learners that make both relating and learning possible. We may not have a 'clear idea' about a particular learner, but we do have hints.

Some hints can be taken from memoirs and autobiographical writing of the kind examined in this study, and from interpretations of that writing. The first hint might be a very gentle one, the simple reminder that self-writing gives us of the existence in each individual of a multi-layered inner world, and of the importance of tolerating 'the particular peace its author has made between the individuality of his or her subjectivity and the intersubjective and public character of meaning' (Grumet, 1990: 324). For in the complex daily work of education, with its demands and vicissitudes, and its foregrounding of overtly-manifested and readily-observable learning processes as means to perceptible, tangible, quantifiable products of learning, there is a tendency to abstract the learner's - and the teacher's - less visible, subjective and unconscious experiences. This is simply to say that it is quite a difficult thing to remain mindful of the lives of the persons involved in education, to begin to 'recover human feeling and motivation for studies of education that [have] become anonymous and quantitative' (Grumet, 1990: 322).

A second hint that might be taken, from reading and perhaps also from writing autobiography and memoir, is a kind of intimation of relatedness, different from generalisation, but offering the possibility of thinking about shared aspects of experience among, in this case, second-language learners. Not certainty, we must remember, but possibility: not that one individual's learning must, but it might, be a little like another's. Second-language learners in mid-process may not be able to speak about their experience, and there may be ethical reasons not to demand that they do so, but educators might take hints about those silences from the narratives of others. And those hints, once taken, may give us something to ground our intuition and guide our pedagogy, and allow for the possibility that educators can take care without taking control.

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 121, 122.