Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Silence in Second Language Learning: A Present Absence
- Chapter 1: Averting the Gaze: Silence in Second Language Acquisition Research
- Chapter 2: Changing the Subject: Psychoanalytic Theory, Silence and the Self
- Chapter 3: Looking and Looking Again: Memoirs of Second Language Learning
- Chapter 4: Reading Between the Lines: Language Learner Diaries
- Chapter 5 Taking the Hint: Working with Silence
- References
- Index
Introduction: - Silence in Second Language Learning: A Present Absence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2026
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Silence in Second Language Learning: A Present Absence
- Chapter 1: Averting the Gaze: Silence in Second Language Acquisition Research
- Chapter 2: Changing the Subject: Psychoanalytic Theory, Silence and the Self
- Chapter 3: Looking and Looking Again: Memoirs of Second Language Learning
- Chapter 4: Reading Between the Lines: Language Learner Diaries
- Chapter 5 Taking the Hint: Working with Silence
- References
- Index
Summary
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, 1986A 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, 1997When 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.
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- Silence in Second Language LearningA Psychoanalytic Reading, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Multilingual MattersFirst published in: 2026
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