'The good-enough teacher', writes Britzman (1998: 42), 'must also help herself in tolerating the results of her ... own frustration'. That is to say, while some pedagogies may help alleviate silence, and in so doing make the work of the teacher easier, or tolerable, or in some cases possible at all, it is important to remember that alleviating silence may not always be the most useful (or even a possible) immediate objective for the learner. Put differently, when as teachers we consider how best to motivate learners, we must also attend to moments in the learning process when the question of motivation may simply not be relevant - moments that must be worked through. This may be one of the ways in which learner-centred approaches such as those recommended by the learner autonomy model might be useful - if they can help teachers to understand that both speaking and silence belong, ultimately, to the learner....
It seems to me that this kind of silence, and more specifically the idea of finding, or deliberately making, this kind of silent period, is a silence that opens up rather than shuts down - a silence that might hint at a way of thinking about learning not only a new language as such, but also other kinds of knowledge. For losses as well as gains area part not only of language learning, but also of the process of acquiring new knowledge or of learning a new theory, either of which can insist upon a psychical movement as well as a conscious intellectual shift into a new theoretical language and the corresponding theoretical milieu. As Eva Hoffman discovered, it is not enough just to learn new words; one must learn the new world as well. And at different times and in different contexts, we all have to do this. Certainly there is a sense in which this book is telling the story of a kind of language learning, for implicit in the work of triangulating several theoretical discourses is the task of making each of them speak to the others. I have attempted to negotiate a kind of conversation between psychoanalytic theory, social theory and SLA research, and in turn to weave that conversation into a dialogue with the narrative texts that seem so compelling - a new theoretical language, a new conversation.
I wonder whether, in this negotiation, this conversation, there might perhaps also be something that hints at some of the larger questions that relate not only to language learning but also to other kinds of learning that may interfere with individuals in profound and even disturbing ways. How do we learn? How do we give voice to our learning? And how do we tolerate learning, what do we do with the problem of articulating learning, when it is just too hard? It is subtle, this kind of educative hint that the concept of silence might provide concerning ways of thinking about learning theory, for example, or about theorising learning. But even so, like the kind of 'education through hinting, about hinting' that Phillips calls psychoanalysis, such hints might act as a hopeful' ...kind of go-between between teaching and seduction, sustaining both a complicity and a difference' (Phillips, 1999: 109) - embodying, in other words, their own conflicts, their own ambivalence, and their own irreconcilable oppositions, but also, as psychoanalysis keeps insisting, their own wishes and desires.
I find it fascinating that Granger finishes with a final arc that wonders whether questions of 'silent periods' should only be asked by language teachers, or whether far broader applications for this kind of theory can be formulated within the education community. In a sense, she has taken us back to the womb/childhood to investigate psychoanalytically, but she has also swung the discussion back to how we absorb and finally synthesize challenging theoretical discourses, even when they're in our native language.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner.
