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    Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading
    Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading
    Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading
    Ebook259 pages5 hours

    Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading

    By Colette A. Granger

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    Within the complex process of second language acquisition there lies a highly variable component referred to as the silent period, during which some beginning second language learners may not willingly produce the target language. Silence in Second Language Learning claims that the silent period might represent a psychical event, a non-linguistic as well as a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation and re-formation. Colette Granger calls on psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss, and on language learning narratives, to undertake a theoretical dialogue with the learner as a being engaged in the psychical work of making, and re-making, an identity. Viewed in its entirety, this study takes the form of a kind of triangulation of three elements: the linguistically described phenomenon of the silent period; the psychoanalytically oriented problem of the making of the self; and the real and remembered experiences of individuals who live in the silent space between languages.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMultilingual Matters
    Release dateFeb 16, 2004
    ISBN9781788920407
    Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading
    Author

    Colette A. Granger

    Marie Rodet is a senior lecturer in the history of Africa at SOAS. Her research interests lie in the field of modern migration history, gender studies and the history of slavery in francophone West Africa. She is the author of Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900–1946 and coeditor of Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration.

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      Book preview

      Silence in Second Language Learning - Colette A. Granger

      Introduction

      Silence in Second Language Learning: A Present Absence

      One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

      Émile M. Cioran Anathemas and Admirations, 1986

      A five-year-old child newly arrived in Toronto, whose first language is

      not English, attends his all-English kindergarten for several months

      without speaking. The teacher tries hard to interest him in the brightly

      coloured building blocks and other toys, art materials and books, but he

      remains passive, distant, silent. His silence is disturbing. His teacher is

      concerned, but she is also wise: she waits. Then one day the class takes a

      trip to the zoo. In the section devoted to reptiles, the boy spots a

      reticulated python, wrapped several times around a branch inside a

      large, glass-fronted display case. The boy darts over to his teacher, grabs

      her hand tightly and pulls her hard, insistently, away from her

      conversation with another student, over to the glass case. He points at

      the python and shouts, over and over, 'Me know this! Me know this!

      This my home, teacher, this my home!'

      Dale Smith

      Personal communication, 1997

      When the story of that young child's awakening into English was first related to me by his teacher, I wondered how she might have felt when, after months of silence, her student finally began to speak. I was curious about how the child himself might have felt, speaking out for the first time in a new language. But most of all I wanted to think about the meaning of the period during which the child had not spoken: his months of silence. How did he live? What was he doing? Who, indeed, was he?

      This study grew out of that curiosity. My original intention was to interrogate the experience of that boy, and others like him, who dwell for a time in the solitary space between a first and a second language. I wanted to articulate my curiosity about a component of the highly complex and individualised process of second language acquisition (SLA)¹ - a phenomenon referred to by linguists as the silent period, and generally defined as a span of time of varying length, during which some beginning second language (L2) learners do not willingly produce the language they are learning. This silent period, so described, parallels to a substantial degree the first year or so of life prior to the beginning of speech in the mother tongue. During this time, according to Rod Ellis, 'children go through a lengthy period of listening to people talk to them before they produce their first words' (Ellis, 1996: 82). The pre-production stage of the first-language learner is distinguished from the L2 silent period both by cognitive development and by physiology. Ellis (1996: 82) writes that in the first language a 'silent period is necessary, for the young child needs to discover what language is and what it does'. The vocal apparatus also has to develop sufficiently for language production. By contrast, in second language acquisition the development of the physical apparatus has been achieved, and a language (and therefore, presumably, some knowledge about language) has been acquired.

      My wish was to explore the question of whether the silent period might also be a psychological phenomenon, a non-linguistic as well as a linguistic step in the continuous process of self-concept formation and re-formation. But mostly I wanted to try to foreground the relationship between individual identity and self-concept, as expressed in and by the silent period, and the process of second language acquisition. Words and worlds are threads woven together into the fabric of lived experience: what happens, I wondered, when they become unravelled?

      The first thing that happened, and it happened quite early on, was that my own tidy little wish came undone. First, I was surprised to discover that, while a number of reasons have been offered by way of explanation for this stage of L2 acquisition (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Lightbown & Spada, 1996; Saville-Troike, 1988), one of its most striking features is that it does not seem to occur in all learners. Moreover, when it does occur it varies, in degree and in duration. The silent period is more idiosyncratic than I had imagined, and consequently not as clearly conceptualised or described as I had anticipated. Indeed, so variable is it that, in contrast with its apparent equivalent, the necessary and universal pre-verbal period in first language acquisition, Ellis describes it as 'not obligatory', since an second language learner 'already knows about language' (1996: 82). And linguistic research bears out this conceptualisation of a silent period as a typical, yet nevertheless variable and non-universal, occurrence in second language acquisition (Gibbons, 1985; Naiman et al., 1978; Saville-Troike, 1988).

      The idiosyncrasy of the silent period suggests that the numerous phenomena that second language acquisition (SLA) research groups in the category 'silent period', and perhaps even the concept of silence writ large, are not quite transparent. The question asks itself: precisely what might it signify that a stage in a learning process is not obligatory? In this particular context, what does it mean to say that the previous acquisition of a first language renders a silent period unnecessary in the learning of a second? If it is truly redundant for an individual who already 'knows about language', given that such knowledge is by definition a necessary precondition to second language acquisition, no second language learner should ever undergo a silent period. And yet many do - perhaps more than we know or can readily determine. Depending on the definition applied (and specifically on the lack of consensus about how long or short a period of silence should be to constitute a 'silent period' as such), it can be argued that all second language learners go through a pre-production period that might, again depending on definition, be labelled a silent period.

      In the light of the position I take in this study, namely that silence in second language acquisition is a much larger phenomenon than what is named the silent period, these questions, however interesting, are not central. And so, taking at face value, for the moment, Ellis's assessment of the silent period as non-obligatory I surmise that knowledge of a first language is a necessary, but perhaps not a sufficient, condition for the elimination of a silent period in second language learning. That it occurs at all, however idiosyncrarically must therefore be attributable, at least in part, to something else.

      As well as being a series of intra-personal cognitive stages, SLA is without doubt also a social process. It takes place within the individual, certainly, but that individual is moving at all times through a world populated, and articulated linguistically, by others. In the case of the second language learner, that world and its population may differ in many ways from the environment in which the first language was acquired. Such differences might well impose on the learner demands that are new, complex, and even - in ways that are social as well as linguistic - incomprehensible.

      But first language acquisition is a social process too. Even the Chomskyan (1972) view of an innate capacity for language does not claim that language development is possible in the complete absence of social contact. In fact, the cognitive work that Ellis (1996: 82) refers to as the discovery of 'what language is and what it does' can take place only in an environment where language is present and available to be discovered. From the perspective of language as a social phenomenon, then, might there be fewer, or different, reasons for a silent period in the acquisition of a second language than in the acquisition of a first?

      The silent period, along with its unpredictability, is a troubling issue, not only for linguists but also for educators. Given that they often encounter second-language learners (whether by design in the case of second language instruction, or by accident when a student's mother tongue is not the language of instruction), it follows that teachers too, at least from time to time, find themselves confronted by the silence of the second-language learner. What are they to do? How are they to understand this silence - as cognitive or affective, desirable or problematic, deliberate or unconscious, guileless or manipulative? How might they respond to it? And how might they engage with it pedagogically? To explore these questions is part of the work of this study. Yet to begin such an exploration involves asking what purpose the silent period might serve: what precisely is silence in second language acquisition, and what is that silence being used by the learner to do?

      Like the methodological problems in SLA research, some of which I will enumerate below, the complexities of an individual's experience as an second-language learner - and the difficulties of interpreting that experience and the silence within it - arise at least in part out of two interrelated issues. First, neither language acquisition nor the study of it is a tidy process. There is a kind of muddiness inherent both in the research methods in question and in the subject (that is, the topic) under investigation, which is not easily explained - or 'researched' - away. Relatedly, this muddiness arises, I propose to a significant extent, out of a widespread tendency to overlook or avoid another element - another 'subject' -that may be messier and more complex than either language learning or language research and that to me seems crucial to the assessment of individual differences in language acquisition. This element is the learning, speaking (and at times silent), individual. More specifically, it is that individual's self, or self-concept, which remains unnamed in at least two ways: first by SLA research which, to a substantial degree, floats on the already-cloudy surface of personality rather than diving into the murkier depths below; and second by the subject him- or herself, the language learner who, as I will argue later, simply cannot do the naming. The problem becomes how to study something that linguistics describes and measures, that pedagogy (both in practice and in theory) often perceives as an empty phenomenon, that the individual subject cannot explain despite - or because of -being immersed in it, and that 'common sense' denies has importance at all.

      Moreover, as a focus of study, the silent period in the context of second language learning (and silence qua silence in any context) is inherently problematic. After all, whether transparent or not, whether informed by prior knowledge or not, whether obligatory or not, it is by definition, in some sense at least, silent. And in Western cultures whose naturalised, common-sense operating principles favour performance over contemplation, participation over inaction, and - what is most relevant here - speech over silence, there is something peculiar, even counter-intuitive, about investigating something that in a sense is not there. It is a struggle to reconstruct silence, not as an absence, an emptiness that must be filled with something else in order to be meaningful, but rather as an invesrigable actuality. Nevertheless, this is the position I take: that, however counterintuitive it might seem, the 'emptiness' of silence within second language learning is imagined and not real. For, just as silence is part of language itself, encoded and unencoded, lying both within and outside speech at the levels of phonology, syntax and discourse, as well as in the sense that begins to approach what I am addressing here, of 'things not said' (Schmitz, 1994), silence in general and the silent period in particular are significant aspects of second language acquisition.

      If there is more to the silent period than the mere absence of speech, there is also a sense in which something seems to be absent from linguistics' explanations of it. Where SLA research disappoints, in my view, is in its reluctance to recognise adequately and explore deeply the multiple non-linguistic levels on which L2 acquisition functions. Here I am not referring only to aspects or characteristics such as age, gender, motivation, attitudes or learning styles, which have certainly been named, counted, categorised, defined and described in various and often useful ways. As well as listening for 'things not said', my aim is to consider the subjective experiences of some of the persons who are 'not saying' those things. The term personality, which is commonly put forward both as comprising such traits as self-esteem, affect, anxiety, extroversion and motivation (Brown, 1994a; Naiman et al, 1978), and as informing choices made by learners in some circumstances (Harder, 1980), perhaps comes closest to what I want to examine, but even it is not quite adequate. Rather, just as linguistics itself, for example, distinguishes between surface and deep structures of syntax, such that surface structure is based on what lies, metaphorically, beneath it, so I seek to look at deeper aspects of individuals, aspects that ground the 'surface structures' of self-esteem, extroversion and personality in general. And this goal invites, again, that more fundamental question: what is the significance of silence in the process of learning to speak?

      My second and more daunting discovery, in addition to the idiosyncratic aspects of the silent period itself, was this: just as there is more to the silent period than a mere absence of speech, silence itself within the second language acquisition process is a much larger phenomenon, and more multifaceted, than the silent period as such. For example, Ron Scollon and Suzanne Scollon's study of interethnic communication (Scollon & Scollon, 1981) offers a clear and helpful comparison between the ways in which Athabaskan and English speakers perceive one another with respect to silence and speech. And in Perspectives on Silence, Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike gather together the writing of authors who illuminate quite diverse ways of thinking about and interpreting various kinds of silence (Tannen & Saville-Troike, 1985). Within that collection, George Saunders' work on the use of 'noise and silence ... as stylised strategies' for management of emotions (Saunders, 1985: 165), Gregory Nwoye's examination of numerous socially and individually negotiated ritual and ceremonial silences among the Igbo people of Nigeria (Nwoye, 1985), and a discussion of 'the silent Finn' by Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara (Lehtonen & Sjavaara, 1985: 193) point to multiple, culturally-organised meanings and valuations of silence. The Tannen and Saville-Troike volume also includes Emma Muñoz-Duston and Judith Kaplan's highly useful annotated listing of works, originating in fields as diverse as sociolinguisrics, religion and business, that interpret silence as 'ranging from hesitation phenomena ... to nonverbal communication' (Muñoz-Duston & Kaplan, 1985: 235).

      The literature on these multiple uses and functions of silence is highly interesting and significant, but it is not my precise focus in this book. Rather, I am interested in reading silence within the second language acquisition process less as an interpretable communicative strategy and more as a manifestation of identity-formation processes (which consist of intra- and interpersonal components), though the two are, of course, not unrelated. To me, it is as if the learner's psychical state, specifically that individual's self-concept, functions as a kind of cloth woven out of the threads of all the mutually-informing phenomena (such as learning style, cognitive and social factors, and personality) that help to shape the rate and degree of an individual's success in second language acquisition. To investigate either those individual threads or the final garment (the person who has moved, to whatever degree of success, through the second language acquisition process) without examining the cloth itself and the tearing, fraying and re-stitching to which it might be subjected by the process of SLA, would be to neglect a central aspect of that process.

      The question of silence is interesting merely for the fact that it is concomitant and apparently crucial to the process for some, but not all, second-language learners. But it is even more interesting, and I argue more important, for what it might articulate despite, or indeed through, its apparent lack of expression. I hold that what silence signifies could actually be much more than the absence of speech during the process of second language acquisition, that it may be a psychical moment, as well as a linguistic stage, in the complex process of moving from one language to another, and from one self to another. For silence is not limited to the absence of verbal expression. The self, the identity, can also be silent, unexpressed, and even - at least temporarily - lost. Further, the experience of a silenced self, which can occur in a shift from one linguistic identity to another, is not limited to individuals taking up a new life in a new country: I recall the story of a student who, having withdrawn from a French immersion class, said that he felt as if part of his identity had been removed (Gillis, 1999, personal communication). Neither is the experience limited to the acquisition of a second language. A six-year-old child attending a Grade 1 class near Toronto, who had learned English (her mother tongue) in Jamaica, confided to me that she felt �like nothing' when her teacher (also Anglophone but born in Canada) made her pronounce, over and over, the words 'the' and 'thank you' because, said the teacher, the girl's pronunciation of the digraph th was 'wrong'.

      The title of this introduction is suggested by a passage in Shoshana Felman's book What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference, in which she engages 'the nameless I who, present as an absence, is the bearer of the silence and the speech of [Virginia Woolf's] A Room of One's Own and who... is speaking insofar as she is voiceless, executed, dead' (Felman, 1993: 45; italics in original). The voicelessness to which Felman refers is linked to her argument that 'none of us, as women, has as yet, precisely, an autobiography'. She maintains that this lack is a consequence of women's having been socialised 'to see ourselves as objects and to be positioned as the Other, estranged to ourselves ... ' (Felman, 1993: 14). If, as Felman puts forward, an individual needs a life story - an autobiography - in order to have a voice, and if, conversely, she must have a voice with which to tell that life story, what can it mean to have a voice and a language, and then, if not to lose the voice literally, to find oneself, nevertheless, quite outside the language, exiled from its power to tell? Might it be like losing one's own story altogether, like having a 'room of one's own' but misplacing the key that opens the door to that room? While Felman is describing a voicelessness that differs in quality and in context from that of the second-language learner, whom I regard as caught between two languages and therefore not located in or held by either, there is, I think, something analogous between these two kinds of estrangement. The first is separation from oneself and one's story through sexual difference read as otherness, the second is an otherness to oneself, as well as to one's social environment, that arises from

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