Table of Contents

Introduction - silence in second language learning - a present absence; 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; 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; 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; reading between the lines - language learner diaries, why diaries?, reading and interpreting the diaries; taking the hint - working with silence.

About the Author

Colette Granger works in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research explores issues in several areas of education, including second language learning, teacher education and new technologies. Guiding all her work is an overarching question about the ways in which broad social goals, institutional and curricular objectives, and the internal worlds of the individual participants in education collide and at times disrupt one another. This is her first book.