SLA: Teaching through the Silent Period

'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.

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 124, 125.

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.

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.

SLA: Parapraxis - no mistakes!

...what in common parlance might be called 'innocent mistakes'. But for psychoanalysis 'there is nothing innocent about forgetting, slips of the tongue, jokes, indeed all forms of parapraxis - those bungled actions that point elsewhere even as they can be observed as interfering with daily life' (Britzman, 1998: 68). Anna Freud explains:

Examining the small mistakes in the everyday life of human beings, such as forgetting, losing, or misplacing things, misreading or mishearing, psychoanalysis succeeded in demonstrating that such errors are always based on an intent of the person who makes them ... Psychoanalytic investigation established that, generally speaking, we forget nothing except what we wish to forget for some good reason or other, though that reason is usually quite unknown to us. (A. Freud, 1974: 81-82)

And Ehrman and Dornyei expand on this noting that, according to the psychoanalytic principle of psychic determinism, 'behaviour is meaningful and not random or accidental ...' and 'individuals ... [unconsciously] give each other messages about their feelings and wishes' (Ehrman & Dornyei, 1998: 11)

(p. 105)

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 105.

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.

Silent Period: Liminality in SLA

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.

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

.  

(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)

Silence in SLA Research: From Personality to Identity

SLA research was born of the science of linguistics, nurtured by a psycholinguistic approach primarily concerned with cognition, and more recently step-parented by sociolinguistic perspectives (Ellis, 1996: 1). Initially occupying itself with the characteristics and properties of learner language, it has moved towards including an examination of issues of affect, but in a sense it seems uncertain about how to proceed. And no wonder - the problem of the identity of the subject is both immeasurably problematic to perceive and perceptibly difficult to measure and analyse. And when we combine the problems of identity, perception, measurement and analysis with the idea of studying, not language as such, but rather silence within language, the difficulty becomes more daunting still. What exactly is lacking, and what can be done about it?

(p.28)

Might we perhaps consider silence s more than just a direct and exclusively linguistic consequence of either a concentration on - or a lack of - comprehension, as Dulay et al. (1982) and Gibbons (1985) would have it? Equally, might silence originate in or be a symptom of something other than, or additional to, the problem of incomplete access to the conventions of the target language, as Harder (1980) seems to suggest?

That is, might there be something at stake, more or other than the reduction of a linguistic role per se, in the process of second language acquisition?

Saville-Troike's (1988) discussion about the lack of interest in private speech within first language acquisition research resonates with my own belief that SLA research is, likewise, insufficiently curious about silence as a part of the second language learning process. Following the view of George Miller, articulated in his introduction to Ruth Weir's Language in the Crib (Weir, 1970: 15), Saville-Troike writes that:

the dominant conception of language learning as critically involving responses to the stimuli and reinforcements of a supportive environment had led a focus on mother-child dyadic interaction, and entailed the assumption that nothing 'interesting' was taking place when a child was alone, and in the dark. (Saville-Troike, 1988: 568)

Saville-Troike proceeds to extend this judgement to SLA reseaerch. Her reasoning bears quoting at some length:

While strictly behaviourist theories are no longer in vogue, the now-dominant conception of language learning as critically involving social/interpersonal interaction has left potentially important ... non-interactive phenomena generally out of researchers' awareness. Further, there has been a tendency in the second language learning field to equate overt production with active learning, and lack of overt production with passivity and disengagement. These conceptual perspectives ... have led to an unconscious assumption that nothing of significance was happening unless learners were talking to others. (Saville-Troike, 1988: 568-69)

As I have indicated, it is my view that 'something of significance' is indeed happening, even when learners are silent.

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
(pp. 28-30)