The Silent Period of Second Language Acquisition
There are five different stages in the second language acquisition process:
1) The Silent Period
2) The Early Production Period
3) The Speech Emergence Period
4) The Intermediate Production Period
5) The Advanced Production Period
Even though there is wealth of research on these different stages, out of these five periods, probably the most misunderstood, ignored or even unknown both by teachers and students alike is the first, the Silent Period, which will be the focus of our article today.
What is the Silent Period?
The first stage of the language acquisition process is called “The Silent Period” simply because the students aren’t doing much talking yet. In some learners this period may be shorter or longer, ranging between 2 to 6 months, though it may take much longer too, depending on the exposure to the foreign language that the learner has.
For example, a foreigner living abroad and surrounded by a new language all day may have a shorter silent period than a student in his home country who attends a bilingual school in which a second language is taught for four or five hours a day. In turn, this student’s silent period may be considerably shorter than that of a learner studying a second language for just two hours a week. So it becomes clear that generalizing how long this period may last is nearly impossible because it depends on many personal and individual variables that come into play.
The main characteristic of this stage is that after some initial exposure to the language, the learner is able to understand much more than s/he can produce. You can easily see this in two-year-old babies too! You can speak to them normally and they can definitely understand whatever you say. However, even if they wanted to say exactly what you said, they would not be able to. They may use some of your words but they would find it impossible to express their ideas in a similarly organized way, in spite of the fact that they may understand every single word we said.
This goes hand in hand with the fact that comprehension preceded production. We will always be able to understand much more than we can produce. For example, in spite of knowing little or nothing about economics, accounting and marketing, when I watch or read news reports on those fields, I can get a pretty good and accurate idea of what those reports are about. However, if someone asked me to explain what the reports said, I would surely resort to general language and simpler explanations to describe what the experts stated using specific jargon and technical analysis.
