In other words, at the level of comprehension, I could manage to understand everything, but at the level of production I may not be able to express everything I heard in exactly the same way. Nevertheless, with more exposure on those topics, and if they became meaningful to me and part of my everyday reality, after a while I would be able to start to use that specific jargon as part of my everyday vocabulary. In this example, the stretch of time between my initial exposure to the topic, maybe the first time I heard a report on those topics and the time when I could talk about it freely without jargon or any language-related problems could be considered my silent period in the field.
I want to highlight here that I am stretching the linguists’ definition of this period a little bit while saying this. Linguists refer specifically to the time when a person starts to acquire the language through exposure to it, understands a lot but is unable to express his or her ideas yet. When they talk about the “Silent Period” they do not imply that it refers to the acquisition of language at any stage of the second language acquisition process as I do. This is my humble opinion after several years of working with second language learners. Again, this is something that I have personally noticed that I feel could be perfectly applied to language learners at any stage of their learning as shown in the previous example.
As we have just seen when it comes to the first contact between a language learner with a second language this takes a new dimension, of course. For a long time they may be unable to utter a single word and that is perfectly fine and it is part and parcel of the language acquisition process. What is so peculiar about this period is that it has the special ability to make adult students anxious and drive teachers absolutely crazy! This is by far the most difficult period both for teachers and students alike.
One of the main reasons why I decided to write this article was to remind teachers of this crucial stage in second language acquisition and to make students aware of its existence so as not to place a heavy burden on themselves. By knowing this simple fact both teachers and learners can share the joy of teaching and learning without the stress associated with the feeling that they are not reaching their goals.
On occasions, the teacher’s lack of knowledge of these kinds of issues can produce unintentional disastrous results on their students’ self-esteem. How common it is for those of us who specialize in teaching methodologies to meet disappointed or even angry teachers complaining about their students’ lack of progress.
