It may not be the case that all second-language learners undergo a silent period. Likewise, it may not be that all silences in SLA occur exclusively, or at all, for the reasons I have named. But I offer this possibility: that the silent period in some second-language learners might be a kind of psychical paralysis, a temporary freezing, a complex combination of an inability to articulate and a lowered self-regard. And perhaps this possibility offers us a way to imagine silence as symptomatic of the loss, ambivalence and conflict that accompany a transition between two languages, a psychical suspension between two selves. Silence may thus constitute one response to the encounter between a complicated inside and an incomprehensible and uncomprehending outside.I conclude... by referring briefly to the concept of liminality, as described by Carolyn Heilbrun in a series of lectures on women figures in English literature. It seems to speak meaningfully to the idea that stands at the heart of this project:The word 'limen' means 'threshold', and to be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, to be leaving one condition or country or self and entering upon another. But the most salient sign of liminality is its unsteadiness, its lack of clarity about exactly where one belongs and what one should be doing, or wants to be doing. (Heilbrun, 1999: 3)
The self suspended between languages is a liminal self, living unsteadily in two languages and therefore living fully in neither, for whom silence might be not only a symptom of liminality, but also at least a partial answer to the questions about where the self belongs. Later, when Heilbrun (1999: 37) refers to liminality as a state embodying what Marina Warner (1981: 23) first name 'irreconcilable oppositions' (a quality of ambiguity that allows an individual to 'span opposites'), she might well be speaking of the second-language learner, positioned on the blurred borderline between first and second languages, unable either to turn back and regain the old self or to move forward, unencumbered, into a new one.
Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 62.
