PERSONAL VARIATION IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

TYPES OF VARIATION

STYLES STRATEGIESPERSONALITY

FACTORS

LEARNING STYLES

Field independence

Field dependence and independence

- ability to form acomplete picture

- female feature- sociability,

empathy - interaction

- ability to see the details even among disturbing factors

- increases with age- male feature- independent,

competitive, self-confident

- analysis, classroom learning, focus on details

Types

Left or right brain dominance Ambiguity tolerance Reflexivity – impulsivity Sensual orientation

– Visual– Audial – Kinesthetic

Please, look it up in your

book!

LEARNING STRATEGIES

Good language learners (Rubin, 1975; Stern, 1975)

take charge of their own learning. organise info about language. creative, experimenting. find opportunities to practice. live with uncertainty. use conscious memory strategies for

recall.

learn from errors. rely on their L1 and L3,4… systems. use contextual cues in comprehension. make intelligent guesses. learn chunks and formulas. learn to keep the conversation going. learn different styles and vary them according

to context.

Types

Metacognitive- Advance organisers- Selective/directed

attention- Self-management- Self-monitoring- Self-evaluation

Socioaffective- Cooperation- Clarification

Cognitive- Repetition- Resoucring- Translation- Grouping- Note-taking- Imagery- Keyword- Transfer- Inferencing

Communication strategiesOxford (1990), Dörnyei (1995)

Avoidance

- Message abandonment e.g.:

- I lost my road.- You lost your road?- Uh, … I lost. I lost. I got lost.

- Topic avoidance

Compensation

- Circumlocutione.g. „ the thing you open the bottle with”

- Approximatione.g. ship for sailboat

- All-purpose wordse.g. „Could you pass me that thingie?”

- Word coinagee.g. vegetarianist

- Prefabriacted patternse.g. „Could you tell me the way to …?”

- Non-linguistic signals- Literal translation

e.g. „one-and-a-half room flat”- Foreignizing

e.g. „löncsölni”, „Hozd már ki a hoovert a bedroomból!”

- Code-switchinge.g. „Where is posta?”

PERSONALITY FEATURES

The affective domain

1. Receiving-tolerating2. Responding-committing3. Valuing4. Organisation of values5. Developing an individual value system

Schuman (1997-1999): amygdala

Learning = emotionally motivated activity

Aspects

Self-esteem Inhibition Risk-taking Anxiety Extroversion Motivation

Self-esteem

„a personal judgement of worthiness” (Coopersmith, 1967)

Types: globalsituational or specifictask-related

MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément &Noels (1998): direct + relation to „willingness to communicate”

Inhibition

Self-defence mechanism to protect ego Language ego (Guiora, 1972, Ehrman,

1996) Guiora et. Al. (1972)- the alcohol test

?? Effect on muscular tension Guiora et.al. (1980)- the Valium test

?? Significant tester effect

Stevick (1976) alienation between – Critical me and performing me– L1 culture and L2 culture– Self and other learners– Self and teacher

Ehrman (1999): thick and thin egos in SLLtolerance of mistakes

Risk-taking

Relation to inhibition and ambiguity tolerance

Moderate risk-taking correlates with language learning success

accurate guessesbased on skill

Low-risk takers=avoidance High-risk takers=wild guesses

Anxiety

Types (Oxford, 1999)– Trait– State

Language anxiety (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989)

- communication apprehension- fear of negative social evaluation- text anxiety

Debilitative and facilitative anxiety

Extroversion

Extroversion- Sociable, talkative- Western ideal- Need to receive

ego-enhancement, self-esteen from others

Introversion- Quiet, reserved- Derive a sense of

wholeness and fulfillment independent of others

- Inner strength

Motivation

Types – Integrative– Instrumental– Intrinsic– Extrinsic

Measuring personality factors

Problems- accuracy of self-perceptions- self-flattery syndrome- culturally ethnocentric, not transferrable

Solutions- variety of methods and instruments- validating

Myers and Briggs