This document discusses factors that influence second language acquisition, including intelligence, aptitude, and motivation. Regarding intelligence, some studies have found it correlates more strongly with certain language skills like reading than oral skills. IQ also may correlate more with ability to benefit from instruction than language learning ability itself. The document also discusses Sternberg's theory of analytical, creative, and practical intelligence. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences including verbal, mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist intelligences is presented. The concept of aptitude as the rate of language mastery is introduced. Motivation stories about individuals learning a language for education, relationships, and career purposes are provided

1. Non Language Influences

2.  What causes individual differences in L2 achievement?
 What makes people good or bad language learners?
 Are you a good or bad language learner? What makes
you so?

3. • Intelligence
1. Do you think that intelligence is an important factor in L2 achievement?
2. Do you think that intelligence is a basic ability that affects performance on all
cognitively oriented tasks? For instance do you agree that an intelligent person
will do well in computing mathematical problems, analyzing poetry, taking
history essay examinations, and solving riddles?

4. • Some recent studies have shown that measures of
intelligence (IQ scores) may be strongly related to certain
kind of abilities than to others.
Ex: In a study it was found that while intelligence was related
to the development of second language reading, grammar, and
vocabulary, it was unrelated to oral productive skills.
• Other researchers found that IQ correlates not with FL
learning ability, but with the ability to profit from certain
types of instruction.

5. • Sternberg’s Triarchic Intelligence Theory According to Robert J. Sternberg’s
triarchic theory of intelligence , intelligence comes in three forms: analytical,
creative, and practical.
Analytical intelligence involves the ability to analyze, judge, evaluate, compare, and
contrast.
Creative intelligence consists of the ability to create, design, invent, originate, and
imagine.
Practical intelligence focuses on the ability to use, apply, implement, and put into
practice.
• To understand what analytical, creative, and practical intelligence mean, let’s look at
examples of people who reflect these three types of intelligence:
-Consider Latisha, who scores high on traditional intelligence tests such as the
Stanford-Binet and is a star analytical thinker. Latisha’s analytical intelligence
approximates what has traditionally been called intelligence and what is commonly
assessed by intelligence tests.
-Todd does not have the best test scores but has an insightful and creative mind.
Sternberg calls the type of thinking at which Todd excels creative intelligence .
-Finally, consider Emanuel, a person whose scores on traditional IQ tests are low but
who quickly grasps real-life problems. He easily picks up knowledge about how the
world works. Emanuel’s “street smarts” and practical know-how are what Sternberg
calls practical intelligence.

6. Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
Howard Gardner argues that there are many specific types of intelligence, or frames of mind.
1. Verbal skills: The ability to think in words and to use language to express meaning
(authors, journalists, speakers)
2. Mathematical skills: The ability to carry out mathematical operations (scientists,
engineers, accountants)
3. Spatial skills: The ability to think three-dimensionally (architects, artists, sailors)
4. Bodily-kinesthetic skills: The ability to manipulate objects and be physicallynadept
(surgeons, dancers, athletes)
5. Musical skills: A sensitivity to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone (composers, musicians,
and music therapists)
6. Intrapersonal skills: The ability to understand oneself and effectively direct one’s life
(theologians, psychologists)
7. Interpersonal skills: The ability to understand and effectively interact with others
(successful teachers, mental health professionals)
8. Naturalist skills: The ability to observe patterns in nature and understand natural and
human-made systems (farmers, botanists, ecologists, landscapers)

7. Applications of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to children’s education continue to
be made (Campbell, 2008).
Following are some specific strategies that teachers can use related to Gardner’s eight
types of intelligence (Campbell, Campbell, & Dickinson, 2004):
1. Verbal skills. Read to children and let them read to you, visit libraries and
bookstores with children, and have children summarize and retell a story they have read.
2. Mathematical skills. Play games of logic with children, be on the lookout for
situations that can inspire children to think about and construct an understanding of
numbers, and take children on field trips to computer labs, science museums, and
electronics exhibits.
3. Spatial skills. Have a variety of creative materials available for children to use,
take children to art museums and hands-on children’s museums, and go on walks with
children. When they get back, ask them to visualize where they have been and then draw a
map of their experiences.
4. Bodily-kinesthetic skills. Provide children with opportunities for physical
activity and encourage them to participate, provide areas where children can play indoors
and outdoors, and encourage children to participate in dance activities.
5. Musical skills. Give children an opportunity to play musical instruments, create
opportunities for children to make music and rhythms together using voices and
instruments, and take children to concerts.
6. Intrapersonal skills. Encourage children to have hobbies and interests,
listen to children’s feelings and give them sensitive feedback, and have children keep a
journal or scrapbook of their ideas and experiences.
7. Interpersonal skills. Encourage children to work in groups, help children to
develop communication skills, and provide group games for children to play.
8. Naturalist skills. Create a naturalist learning center in the classroom, engage

8. • Aptitude
1. Do you think that some individuals have an exceptional aptitude for second
language learning?
2. In the popular imagination, language-learning ability is associated with
being good at certain other skill areas: People say ‘if you are good at
languages you are probably good at Subject X as well’. Do you agree with
that? Give examples.
One ‘Subject X’ is music. People sometimes express the view that being good at
foreign language goes with being good at music.

9. • Ex: Christopher the savant man
Savants are people who may be backward in
most areas yet who have extraordinary skills in
just one area. Christopher is a savant man. He
was born in 1962, and was diagnosed as brain-
damaged at the age of six weeks. Smith and
Tsimpli (1995) describe him like this:
«He is unique. He is institutionalised because he
is unable to look after himself; he has difficulty
in finding his way around; he has poor hand-eye
co-ordination, turning many everyday tasks
such as shaving; but he can read, write and
communicate in any of fifteen to twenty
languages»
His case seems to provide strong evidence for
the idea that there is such a thing as an aptitude
for FL learning that is seperate from general
cognitive ability.

10. • Ex: Lorraine Obler (1989) reports that a man, whom she
calls CJ, has such a specialized ability. CJ is a native speaker
of English who grew up in an English home. His first true
experience with a second language came at the age of 15
when he began learning French in school. CJ also studied
German, Spanish, and Latin while in high school. At age 20,
he made a brief visit to Germany. CJ reported that just
hearing German spoken for a short time was enough for
him to ‘recover’ the German he had learned in school.
Later, he worked in Morocco where he reported learning
Moroccan Arabic through both formal instruction and
informal immersion. He also spent some time in Spain and
Italy, where he apparently picked up both Spanish and
Italian in very short time.

11. • What is aptitude: According to Carroll (1973)
it is the rate at which students at the
secondary school level , university, and adult
level (will) successfully master a foreign
language.
• Notice that this definition accepts that
everyone can acquire; it is just that some
people do it faster than others.

12. • Which of the following are you good at?
A) The ability to identify and memorize new
sounds.
B) The ability to understand the function of
particular words in sentences.
C) The ability to figure out grammatical rules
from language samples.
D) Memory for new words.

13. • MOTIVATION

14. Why do people learn foreign languages?
• Before we look at other people try to answer the why question for
yourself and for friends. First consider your own language-learning
experiences, and ask yourself what motives for learning were. If you
were obliged to learn, think what the motives of those who obliged you
were.
• Think finally about the world beyond your immediate environment.
Write a list of what you imagine to be the main motives for people
world wide learning languages.

15. • Motivation Stories
Learner number on is Zhang. He lives in Sichuan province of
mainland China. He has BA from his local university in
business studies, and he wants to do a master’s degree
overseas. He has applied to universities in Britain, the US, and
Australia, and there is the chance that he may receive some
scholarship money. Bu all the universities want him to take an
internationally recognized English test before he is offered a
place, and his score on the test must be very high. It is now
January and his test is in June. He does not enjoy language
learning at all, but his situation explains very well why so very
many of his daily waking hours are spent in the (for him)
tedious business of improving his English.

16. • Mike is an Australian. He has just got married to
Carmen, a Spanish girl he met in Sydney where she
was among other things following an English-
language course- yet more language learning! Mike
has never been to Spain, does not speak Spanish at
the moment. But both these things must change. In
the summer the two of them plan to visit Carmen’s
parents in Valencia and neither of her parents
speaks English. Hence he has started to take English
lessons.

17. • Anna Vecsey is a scientist who works for research institute attached
to a university in Budapest, Hungary. She studied English at school,
but her English is poor, and she is made constantly aware of her
need to improve it. This awareness is particularly strong at the
moment because her institute is about to host an international
conference. The language of the conference will be English. Thus,
she has signed up for a language-improvement course at a local
private language school.

18. • Types of Motivation
Gardner and Lambert (1959, 1972) have done pioneering work to explore the nature of
motivation specific to language study. Gardner highlights two different types of
motivation:
1) Instrumental motivation: the desire to learn a language because it would fulfill
certain utilitarian goals, such as getting a job, passing an examination, etc.
2) Integrative motivation: the desire to learn a language in order to communicate with
people from another culture that speak that language; the desire is also there to identify
closely with the target language group.
Instrumental motivation vs integrative motivation
• A distinction has been made in the literature between ‘integrative” and ‘instrumental’
motivation: the desire to identify with and integrate into the target-language culture,
contrasted with the wish to learn the language for the purpose of study or career
promotion. Gardner and Lambert (1959, 1972) showed that success in a
foreign/second language is likely to be lower if the underlying motivational
orientation is instrumental rather than integrative.

19. Anxiety
• Being an anxious person is likely to
affect many aspects of an
individual’s life. What about using a
foreign language? What effects
would you expect anxiety to have
on that? Would all the effects be
bad? Is there anything good about
being anxious?
• Do you think that anxiety and
motivation are interrelated?

20. • Anxiety has been a matter of concern in the field of
foreign language education since the early 1970s.
• It influences many types of learning and academic
achievement; therefore, it has been vastly
examined by psychologists and educationalists.
• How would you define anxiety?

21. • In general, Spielberger (1983) defined anxiety as “the
subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness
and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic
nervous system” (p.01). According to Lang (1971) and Cheng
(2004) anxiety creates cognitive, physiological, and
behavioral responses. Hence, when someone experiences
anxiety s/he mentally experiences negative expectations.
This mental negativity creates physiological outcomes such
as increased heart rate and stomachache. Finally, situations
that create anxiousness are behaviorally avoided.
• The literature on the effects of foreign language anxiety on
student achievement has provided both positive and
negative results. While Chastain (1975) and Kleinmann
(1977) found that foreign language anxiety triggered student
achievement, , studies by Horwitz et al. (1986), MacIntyre
and Gardner (1989), Saito and Samimy (1996), and Gardner
and MacIntyre (1993) found negative correlations between
foreign language anxiety and student achievement.

22. • Tips for dealing with speaking anxiety
1. Breathe
2. Walk
3. Practice and automate language
4. Remember that you do not need to be perfect
5. Use a template and prepare speeches.

23.  Sample Template
- State personal preference- I believe
- Reason 1- First of all
- Detail for I
- Reason 2- Scondly
- Detail for 2
- Reason 3-Finally
- Detail for 3
- Conclusion

24.  Gender
Which gender do you think is better at
L2?
Who do you think has more motivation?

25.  Gur et al. (2000) argue that females perform better than
males on some verbal tasks (verbal fluency) because these
functions are bilaterally represented in the female brain.
Moreover, the finding that women have proportionally larger
language associated regions than males (Wernicke and
Broca) might underlie their superiority in linguistic tasks
(Craig et al., 2004; Harasty et al., 1997) as these areas are
involved in language comprehension, and production.

26. • Personality Factors
• Extroverts and introverts
a) You probably have a general idea of what makes an
introvert and an extrovert. Try to make this idea as
specific as possible. What exactly is an introvert? And
an extrovert? How would you describe yourself?
b) Which do you think are likely to learn languages
better? Why?

27.  The typical extrovert is sociable, likes parties, has many
friends, needs to have people to talk to, and does not like
studying by himself. He craves excitement, takes chances, acts
on the spur of the moment, and is generally an impulsive
individual. He always has a ready answer.
 The typical introvert is a quiet, retiring sort of person,
intospective, fond of books rather than people; he is reserved
and distant, except with intimate friends. He does not like
excitement, takes matters of everyda life with proper
seriousness, and likes a well ordered mode of life.

28.  We saw that different theories and hypothesis make
claims about the importance of input, output, and
interaction. Think about what each of these three
views implies about introverts and extroverts, and
how successful each will be at FL learning?

29. • Tolerance of Ambiguity
Perhaps there are people you know who become very agitated if the
future is unclear to them. People like this simply must know, in any
given situation, what is going to happen to them next. Others, on the
other hand, seem quite happy living in a state of uncertainity.
Budner describes intolerance of ambiguity as the tendency to perceive
ambiguous situations as sources of threat.
Studies have found that tose who are tolerant of ambiguity are better
language learners than those who are not.
This piece of research found another interesting, and related,
connection. This is between intolerance of ambiguity and the degree
tho which learners want their L1 to be used in class. Tolerant learners
are quite happy to be instructed in the FL, although they do not
understand everything. The intolerant ones complain about it.

30. • Ego Permeability
Some individuals may be said to be ‘open’ to the
personalities of others; their egos are permeable.
• An interesting experiement
Guiora et al thought that if someone drinks alcohol, his
ego will be more permeable. He will be more friendly,
more talkative, and more sympathetic to the concerns
of others. The researchers aaplied subjects with
controlled amounts of alcohol, and indeed find an
improvement, related to alcohol intake, in an
individual’s foreign-language pronunciation.
But Brown points out that alcohol also has the effect of
relaxing the muscles, and this might account for any
pronunciation improvement.

31. • Attitude
How important do you think attitude towards the
speakers and culture of the target language is?
Can a learner with poor attitudes in these areas
succeed?
Do you think a good target-language accent
depends on attitudes towards the reference
group? Why?

32. • Types of attitude
1. Attitudes towards reference group and culture
2. Attitude towards success
3. Attitudes towards teacher
4. Attitudes towards your own country
(ethnocentrism and anomie)

33. • Age
• Critical period hypothesis
Lenneberg states that there are maturational constraints on the time a first
language can be acquired. First language acquisition relies on
neuroplasticity. If language acquisition does not occur by puberty, some
aspects of language can be learnt but full mastery cannot be achieved. This
was called the "critical period hypothesis.«
The most reductionist theories are those of Penfield and Roberts (1959)
and Lenneberg (1967), which stem from L1 and brain damage studies;
children who suffer impairment before puberty typically recover re-develop
normal language, whereas adults rarely recover fully. Both theories agree
that children have a neurological advantage in learning languages, and that
puberty correlates with a turning point in ability.
They assert that language acquisition occurs primarily, possibly exclusively,
during childhood as the brain loses plasticity after a certain age. It then
becomes rigid and fixed, and loses the ability for adaptation and
reorganisation.

34. • The theory has often been extended to a critical
period for second-language acquisition (SLA)
Certainly, older learners of a second language rarely
achieve the native-like fluency that younger learners
display, despite often progressing faster than
children in the initial stages. David Singleton states
that in learning a second language, "younger =
better in the long run,«.
• While the window for learning a second language
never completely closes, certain linguistic aspects
appear to be more affected by the age of the learner
than others. For example, adult second-language
learners nearly always retain an immediately
identifiable foreign accent, including some who
display perfect grammar (Oyama 1976).