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Key Features:
- Calls on work in psychoanalysis, social psychology, linguistics and language didactics, weaving these discourses into a highly original synthesis that offers a fresh intervention into the phenomenon of silence in the second language process
- Draws attention to the implications of the interrelatedness of language and identity in ways that are particularly significant in a historical moment in which identities are shifting and being reconceptualised at many levels
Summary:
This text examines the under-researched and often troubling phenomenon of silence in second language learning through a triangulation of SLA research, memoirs and language learner diaries, and psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss. It moves beyond the view of silence as the mere absence of speech, inviting the reader to consider it as both a psychical event and a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation.
Review:
In this text, Granger provides an intriguing and provocative perspective on the presence of silence during communicative interactions with individuals - particularly children - learning a second language.
Janet P. Patterson, California State University, in Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27:4 An important contribution to cross-cultural language study, Colette Granger's Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading examines the complexity of second language acquisition and its function in the ongoing creation of personal identity, demonstrating convincingly that silence is a meaningful and necessary part of the language acquisition process.
Barbara Godard, York University, Toronto Colette Granger identifies the unspoken and unspeakable of the silent period as a paradoxical kind of present absence, treading gently as she coaxes it into the range of the audible with the help of psychoanalytic theory. More speculative and curious than readers of applied linguistics might be accustomed to, Granger offers fresh and original ways of thinking about an old problem. Readers new to psychoanalysis will have no trouble following her argument, and all will be delighted by her lucid and lovely prose.
Alice J. Pitt, Associate Professor of Education, York University, Toronto
Author Biography:
Colette A. Granger works in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research explores the ways in which teaching, learning and identity can be mutually disruptive. In particular she focuses on several areas of education, including second language learning, teacher education, and new technologies, in which she has publishedseveral articles
Readership Level:
Undergraduate / Postgraduate / Research, Professional
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Contents:
1. Introduction: silence in second language learning: a present absence.
2. Averting the gaze: silence in second language acquisition research, defining silence, individual differences, from personality to identity, from the individual to the social, ...and back-from the social to the individual, the individual and psychoanalysis.
3. Changing the subject: psychoanalytic theory, silence and the self, the dynamic self, anxiety, judgement and conflict, loss, mourning and melancholia, ambivalence: holding on, letting go.
4. Looking and looking again: memoirs of second language learning, searching for stories, split by the difference: Eva Hoffman, public and private selves: Richard Rodriguez, the secret self: Patrick Chamoiseau, mastering the subject: Alice Kaplan.
5. Reading between the lines: language learner diaries, why diaries?, reading and interpreting the diaries.
6. Taking the hint: working with silence.
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