SLA: Conflict, Emergency & Multiple Identities in Second Language Learning

Bailey's assessment of this conflict is that Walsleben 'is struggling with the instructor for control of her language-learning experience' (Bailey, 1983: 87). It is unclear who wins this struggle, if indeed it can be said to be 'won' at all. Walsleben is not only exhausted and empty, but she soon becomes silent and absent, bodily as well as linguistically. Ultimately, she leaves the class outright before the end of the course. This struggle between student and teacher takes on some of the colouring of the conflict between inside and outside that, for Freud, emerges from the individual's first judgement: 'I should like to eat this', or 'I should like to spit it out' (Freud, 1925: 439). Here, the 'this' is not only the way the second language is taught, it is the language itself. And the decision of the learner, in this case, is to refuse to eat and to move away from the second-language table, in spite of her previous determination and desire: 'I had spent hours studying Farsi because I want to and was determined to keep progressing ... But suddenly - it do not seem to matter' (Walsleben, 1976: 36; cited in Bailey, 1983: 87).

This conflict between 'taking in' a second language and rejecting it is rooted in the ambivalence of the learner's desire both to learn and to refuse learning that accompanies learning's perpetual state of emergency (Britzman, 1998: 23). It is articulated, within the diary excerpts, in frequent analogies that the diarists make between the relationships of teachers and students and those of parents and children. These analogies also call to mind once again the Freudian concept of the family romance (Freud, 1909), discussed in the previous chapter and entailing, in part, motives of sibling rivalry, among which is a sense in which the child may imagine herself as the product of a clandestine love affair between mother and a man other than her actual father, or alternatively as the only 'legitimate' child among her siblings.

Rebecca Jones, a student of Indonesian, writes that 'a curious form of sibling rivalry developed among [the students]. Dr. Fox ... functioned in the role of the parent with all of the learners acting as children, competing to achieve recognition and attention ...' (1977: 77). For Deborah Plummer, initially, a similar analogy provides a way to think positively about her experience:

The best way I can describe my psychological state in the class is child-like ... I was expected to bring to the class no previous knowledge of the language ... [The teacher] became very much of a parental figure to me, in whom I could place my trust ... [During] class I was an adult who struggled to talk about elementary concrete objects in the most simple, childlike speech. Instead of being frustrated by such a dichotomy, I found it much easier to adopt a childlike identity in the new language ... [This] new identity helped preserve my adult ego and self-confidence. (Plummer, 1976: 5-6; cited in Bailey, 1983: 90)

But Plummer's childlike state is interrupted. Eventually she notices

an abrupt change from the in-class parental figure. In and out of class [the teacher] was a person I highly respected and from whom I sought recognition and approval - as if she were a parent ... I felt that I had lost her recognition, approval and favour. I lost my self-confidence and most of all I lost my childlike feeling. I was an adult ... responsible for my actions and my L2 errors became deflating and wounding . (Plummer, 1976: 8-9; cited in Bailey, 1983: 91)

Plummer's eventual reporting of the satisfactory resolution of her problem further substantiates this idea of her sense of - and her pleasure and unpleasure in - her teacher as a parental figure. She [the teacher] was more sensitive to [Plummer's] needs in class and her subtle attention, unnoticed by others, was very encouraging' (Plummer, 1976: 8-9; cited in Bailey, 1983: 91)

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 62.

Psychical disruption in language learning.

What if language learning, in the sense that it involves a loss of a former, pre-language self, and by implication second language learning as a transformation from first-language self into second-language self, were considered as a process parallel to those that Freud names mourning and melancholia? In this theoretical model, the lost or disappointing object would be neither a loved person nor an idea as such. Rather, it would be part of an individual's own unconscious - the aspect of the self that is lost either in the transformation from non-speaking to speaking self or, in the case of the shift from first to second language shift, in the movement from one language to the second. Might the learning that provokes the transformation be itself a shattering force? Could the psychical activity of learning (including language learning) insofar as it involves both an encounter between the external and the internal in their various aspects and the consequent loss of some aspect of the internal, invoke a process not unlike mourning and - depending on the degree of the disruption - even approach melancholia?

(p. 50)

What shatters the language learner's relationship with the object that is, or was, the pre-language omnipotent self, or the first language not-quite-omnipotent-but-nevertheless-expressive self, is the learning that a new language, a new means of expression, is called for.  But, as Ehrman and Dornyei (1998: 185) point out, individuals may resist learning, and they may do so through silence, because learning 'requires rejection of one's own deficiency'.  That is to say that hand in hand with learning that one needs a new language goes the inferences that the old language (or the pre-language state), and therefore the former version of the self, which lived either without language or within the first language, are no longer sufficient - are even, somehow, wrong.  This learning - this shattering - echoes an earlier learning, an earlier disruption, namely the realisation of the self's separateness (and the corresponding inadequacy of the unseparated self) from its mother.  And further, much as that earlier realisation marked a kind of loss of the previous self (perceived as united with the mother), the acknowledgement of the need to revise the first-language self to include a second language which it now needs to make itself known - even when there is no loss of the mother tongue as such - is a reminder of the loss of the mother as part of the self.  Thus the self disappoints itself

.

(p. 54)

Thus, despite what is gained by acquiring language, the old longing for omnipotence is not completely repressed: it does not die, and furthermore it is re-awakened, or remembered, or even re-experienced, in the acquisition of a second language.  This is so not only because of the longing for the omnipotence of the previous, pre-language state, but also because, with respect to the L2 environment and relative to that second language, the self that has not yet acquired it is, in effect, without speech.  That is, as the primal unspeaking infant is to the speaking child, so is the self of the first language to its later manifestation as speaker of the second language.  Although the stakes are somewhat different in second language acquisition - the self has already sublimated its omnipotence fantasy - what is paralleled is the reluctant relinquishing of a previous linguistic potency.  And the disappointment of this later disruption recalls the earlier one

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(p. 55)

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

Language and the process of self-objectification

Ron Harre's work on the importance of discourse in the field of social constructionism begins with a disclaim (Harre, 1993: 3). While not disputing the concept of individual humans as 'artefacts, products of social process', the most important of which are linguistic and otherwise discursive, Harre refuses the assumption that individual action is always and only socially caused. Individuals, according to Harre, 'are built to be capable of autonomous action'. Significantly for this study, that autonomous action includes the social construction of meaning; for Harre 'the meanings of social events are created, not given' (Harre, 1993: 77). Although it is in social contexts that this creative meaning-making takes place, it is individuals who do the creating, and it is through the symbols of language that they do it. Moreover, the symbols could not exist without these individuals - 'there could not be languages and discursive processes unless there were brains buzzing... and vibrations in the air and marks on paper' (Harre, 1993: 204) without the participation of individuals in them.

Standing in partial contrast to Harre is Ian Burkitt (1991), who presents a critique of traditional views that maintain that the individual's self and the world are separate entities in opposition to each other. In Burkitt's conception of the self as social, and of human beings as continually engaged in social relations, there is little space for a view, such as Harre's of the self as autonomous, as capable of acting on the world as well as interacting with it. Burkitt charges Harre with arguing contradictory claims: on one hand, that 'the public and collective order [is] the basis for social and personal being', and on the other hand that 'the social order is...created by the intentional actions of individuals' (Burkitt, 1991: 75).

While he does not suggest that the notion of the individual is altogether false, Burkitt does privilege the claim that individuality is socially based, and that common-sense Western understandings of the individual human being as 'psychological monad' (Burkitt, 1991: 17), whose individuality is established at birth, are erroneous. He further rejects the notion of meaning-making as a function of the individual mind as, at best, incomplete (1991: 84-85), since for him such interpretations fail to take sufficient account of society itself as a creator of meaning. Rather, he holds that personality is created by forces external to the individual, and shaped by power relations, whose' repression [takes] the initiatives and motives for action away from rational control' (1991: 214).

With regard to the question of language as one of these social forces, Burkitt (1991) draws heavily on George Mead's contention (1934) that the means by which we individuals come to know our own experiences is through knowing others' experiences of us, specifically by becoming 'objects to ourselves' - absorbing and adopting others' perceptions of ourselves 'within a social environment or context of experiences and behaviour in which both [we] and they are involved' (Mead, 1934: 138). For Mead, and for Burkitt, it is language - 'communication in the sense of significant symbols... directed not only to others but also to the individual himself' (Mead, 1934: 139) - that permits this process of self-objectification. Burkitt's view of individuality, or the self, as something that develops rather than being present from birth, similarly echoes Mead's contention that 'the self... arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individuals within that process' (Mead, 1934: 199). Neither Mead nor Burkitt orders subjectivity prior to sociality. On the contrary, the conceptualise communicative acts as forming, and informing, 'the capacity for subjective reflection' that becomes self-consciousness (Burkitt, 1991: 34-35). Similarly, Harre's (1993: 4) view of the self as mutable, socially informed 'location, not a substance or an attribute' that comes into being in contexts in which an individual is 'already treated as [a person] by the others of their family and tribe', is reminiscent of Mead's construction of the self-as-object-to-itself.

Discussion concerning the relationship between language, thought and indentity has also located itself in sociolinguistics since the time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Edward Sapir's (1929: 162) contention that 'the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' foreshadowed Benjamin Whorf's statement, nearly three decades later, that '... the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions that have to be organised... largely by the linguistic systems in our minds' (Whorf, 1956: 213). These assertions, like those of Mead (1934) and Harre (1993) relating to the social self modelling for the individual self, harmonise with Lev Vygotsky's understanding of 'the true direction of the development of thining [as moving] not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual' (Vygotsky, 1997: 36). Indeed, according to William Frawley and James Lantolf, Vygotsky maintained that 'a human being is from the outset social (i.e. dialogical) and then develops into an individual (ie. monological) entity' (Frawley & Lantolf, 1984: 146). And Lacanian thought, arguably, goes even further with respect to the relationship between language and the self. Lacan's argument, asserts Bruce Fink, is that 'without language there would be no desire as we know it - exhilarating, and yet contorted, contradictory, and loath to be satisfied - nor would there be any subject as such' (Fink, 1996: 76).

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
(pp. 32-34)