Individual Learner Journal

THE GREAT IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES

FOR SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Aqlisty Nia Chandra

anc.nia@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

The objectives of the study are to discuss about the important of the individual differences in Second Language Acquisition. The difference and the variations among students are natural.  The study problems of individual differences (IDs) has atrracted a lot of attention in SLA research, and has made considerable advances. There are  number of dimensions of learner differences which are generally acknowledged for example: age, aptitude, motivation, cognitive style, and learning strategies. IDs classifies into three types: (a) learner beliefs, such as the nature of language learning, how important language learning aptitude is, and which are the best learning strategies; (b) affective states, such as fear versus confidence, or learner anxiety due to learner competitive style; and, (c) general factors, including age, strategy use, learning style, aptitude.The individual differences among students should be realized by teachers so that the teachers can give the proper treatment to the students. By giving the proper treatments which are suitable with the capacity of students, the students’ competency can be developed maximally.

Key words: learner differences, second language

INTRODUCTION

In recent decades various factors that impact on second language acquisition (SLA) have been investigated. These have included factors considered to be either innate or environmental factors, as well as teaching and learning approaches such as those deemed to be content-based and student-centred. The role of individual differences in the ultimate attainment of language competence has been excessively studied and there is abundant research on how affective and cognitive factors influence L2 speaking (Dörnyei & Kormos, 2000; Kormos & Trebits, 2012) and reading skills.

The study of language learning strategies forms one branch of SLA research begun in the late 1970s and 1980s, a period in which the focus moved from language-centred approaches towards student-centred approaches to teaching and learning. Learning strategies are learner controlled, and so this branch of study follows a student-centred learning approach. How much learners themselves can improve their learning and performance through modifying their individual differences constitutes part of such an approach. Although the importance of student-centred approaches to teaching is acknowledged, this study concerns improving learning, particularly by focusing on strategy use. Thus, the role of the teacher is considered as representing a pedagogical aspect of environmental influences in student learning only

One of the basic questions in second language acquisition research is what  accounts for students’ differential success in language learning. Some students learn a new language more quickly and easily than others. This simple fact is known by all who have themselves learned a second language or taught those who are using their second language in school. The study problems of individual differences (IDs) has atrracted a lot of attention in SLA research, and has made considerable advances. There are  number of dimensions of learner differences which are generally acknowledged for example: age, aptitude, motivation, cognitive style, and learning strategies (Ellis,1994) . The difference and the variations among students are natural.

 In some cases the fast and the slow is a gift or talent. Some slow students are not lazy, they are diligent but the achievement  are still unsatisfying. On the other hand the teachers do not help them with the proper treatment to arouse their inner competence.  The fact, some slow students become frustration or even drop out because they can not afford the treatment of the teachers who hate them. It means the teachers should adopt the individual difference of students as the consideration in the process of teaching and learning and selecting the material of teaching. The aim of this paper is to discuss about the important of the individual differences in Second Language Acquisition.

DISCUSSION

Second Language (L2) learners vary on a number of dimensions to do with personality, motivation, learning style, aptitude and age. Aspect of SLA influenced by individual learner factors. Two basics possibilities regarding which aspect of SLA are affected by individual learners, they are:

1.      The differences in age, learning style, aptitude, motivation, and personality result.

2.      The factors influence only rate and ultimate success in SLA.

Ellis (1994) classifies IDs into three types: (a) learner beliefs, such as the nature of language learning, how important language learning aptitude is, and which are the best learning strategies; (b) affective states, such as fear versus confidence, or learner anxiety due to learner competitive style; and, (c) general factors, including age, strategy use, learning style, aptitude. (These are labelled ‘demographic variables’ by Oxford, 1990b.) It is clear that the three types of IDs are interrelated. Ellis also suggests that beliefs and affective states change with experience. One such change in experience may be strategy training. However, the implication is that IDs in the third group are less likely to change with experience. There has been little research into this area and, therefore, Ellis’ implication remains open to dispute.

Both Oxford (1990b) and Skehan (1991) point out that there is as yet no comprehensive theory of individual differences in SLA. We do not know enough about the relationships between IDs nor how they affect or are affected by learning conditions. It is acknowledged by learning strategy researchers (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990b) that IDs are related to strategy choice, though exactly how remains unanswered.

Identification and Classification of learner factors

The identification and classification of the different individual factors has proved to be problematic. The main difficulty is that it is not possible to observe directly qualities, such as aptitude, motivation, or anxiety. Hawkey (1982) lists some of these: affective, cognitive and ability factors (Chastain 1975) and attitudinal / motivational characteristics (Gardner et al. 1975).

Personal factors

Personal factors such as those identified by Schumann and Schumann are difficult to observe by a third person. This methodological problem has been solved in two ways. First, through the use of diaries studies, Second, through the use of questionnaires and interviews with individual learners. Personal factors are by definition heterogeneous:

1.      Group Dynamic

Group Dynamics (henceforth GD) seem to be important in the classroom of SLA. Bailey (1983) records in some details the anxiety and competitiveness experienced by a number of diarists. Some classroom learners make overt comparisons of themselves with other learners. In other kind of comparisons, learners match how they think they are progressing against their expectations. McDonough (1978) also pinpoints GD as an important set of personal variables. He notes, however, that although rivalries can promote confusion, they can also serve a stimulus for learning.

2.      Attitudes to the Teacher and Course Materials

Students will inevitably have very different views about the kind of teacher they think is best for them. Some prefer a teacher who creates for them to pursue their own learning path. Others prefer a teacher who structures the learning tasks much more tightly. Pickett (1978) study of successful language learning reveals greater diversity in attitudes towards the role of the teacher. Some learners wanted the teacher to act as ‘informant’, but others praised teachers who were logical, clear, and systematic. The main generalization to emerge from Pickett’s study is that learner needs to feel sympathy for their teacher, and also want him or her to be predictable. Learners also vary in their attitudes to teaching materials, In general. Adult learners dislike having a course book imposed upon them in a rigid way. They prefer a variety of materials and the opportunity to use them in ways they choose for themselves.

3.      Individual Learning Techniques

There is tremendous variety in the techniques employed by different learners. They will be dealt with in two groups: those involved in studying the L2, and those involved in obtaining L2 input. Naiman (1978) and Pickett (1978) identify numerous study techniques:

a.       Preparing and memorizing vocabulary lists

Individual learners appear to have highly idiosyncratic ways of copying with this. For instance, one of Picket’s subjects kept a notebook in which he recorded first the English word, then the foreign word in phonetic transcription, and finally the orthographic version of the foreign word. He reported having three vocabulary lists, which he kept going at the same time: one was arranged chronologically, the second alphabetically, and the third either grammatically or situationally.

b.       Learning words in context

Some learners made no attempt to keep lists. They relied on picking out key vocabulary items from the contexts in which they were used.

c.        Practicing vocabulary

Various techniques fall under this heading: deliberately putting words into different structures in order to drill one, reading to reinforce vocabulary, playing games such as trying to think of words wit the same ending, and repeating words to oneself.

Learners’ beliefs about language learning

Virtually all learners, particularly older learners, have strong beliefs about how their language instruction should be delivered. Learner beliefs are usually based on previous learning experiences and the assumption that a particular type of instruction is better than others.  Learner beliefs can be strong mediating factors in learners’ experience in the classroom. Learners’ preference for learning, whether due to their learning styles or to their beliefs about how language are learned, will influence the kinds of strategies they choose  to learn new material. Teachers can use this information to help learners expand their repertoire of learning strategies and thus develop greater flexibility in their second language learning.

Learners’ affective states

There are types of anxiety, names trait anxiety and state anxiety. Trait anxiety is a more permanent predisposition to be anxious, while state anxiety is a type of anxiety experienced in relation to some particular event or act; temporary and context-specific. More recent research acknowledges that anxiety is more likely to be dynamic and dependent on particular situations and circumstances. Anxiety can play an important role in L2 learning if it interferes with the learning process. Debilitative (harmful) Anxiety vs. Facilitative (helpful) Anxiety: Not all anxiety is bad and a certain amount of tension can have a positive effect and facilitate learning. A learner’s willingness to communicate has also been related to anxiety. It is often affected by the number of people present, the topic of conversation, and the formality of the circumstances. Willingness to communicate or state anxiety can also be affected by learners’ prior language learning & use experience, self-confidence, and communicative competence. How anxiety affects learning will depend on its strength and the situational context.

General factors

1.      Age
Age is the variable that has been most frequently considered in discussions of individual differences in SLA. The main aim in this section is to highlight the key elements in this complex issue by first examining the effects of age and then looking at various explanations of these effects.

Effects of age on rate of second language learning

a.       Adults are superior to children in rate of acquisition

b.      Older children learn more rapidly than younger children

c.       With regards to morphology and syntax, the adolescents do best, followed by the adults and then the children

d.      Grammar differences diminish over time, and children begin to catch up, but adults outperform children in the short term

e.       Where pronunciation is concerned, adults do not always progress more rapidly than children do

Thus: adults learn faster than children, and this is more applicable to grammar than pronunciation, although in the case of formal learning situations adults seem to do better even in the pronunciation area. It is not clear when children start to catch up.

Effects of age on the acquisition of native speaker proficiency

a.       Some people say that under the right conditions adults can achieve native-like proficiency in pronunciation.

b.      Other people believe that even very advanced learners lack some of the linguistic abilities of native speakers.

Thus: it is possible that under ideal circumstances learners who start after puberty can learn to produce speech and writing that cannot easily be distinguished from that of native speakers.  In fact starting early is no guarantee that native-speaker abilities will be achieved, even in the most favourable learning situations.

Effects of age on learners’ second language achievement

a.       Age has very little (if any) effect on the process of acquisition. The effect may be a minimal one in the case of grammar –remember Interlanguage developmental stages-, but perhaps a little bit more significant in the case of pronunciation.

b.      In naturalistic settings, learners who start as children achieve more native-like accent than those who start as teenagers or adults.

c.       In formal contexts this does not happen, perhaps because the amount of exposure needed for the age advantage of young learners to emerge is not enough.

d.      Even if younger is better in the long run, it does not apply to the acquisition of English literacy skills: older is better, as they benefit from prior literacy experience (learners who already know how to read and write in their first language). .

Cognitive explanations

One obvious difference between young child and the adolescent or adult is the ability of the latter to comprehend language as a formal system. Older learner can learn about language by consciously studying linguistics rules. The also can apply these rules when they use the language. In contrast, younger children, while not totally lacking in meta-awareness, are not so prone to respond to language as form. As Halliday (1973) pointed out that the young child responds not so much what language is to what it does. It is possible that age differences in SLA can be explained in terms of the different orientation to language of children and older learners.

Affective explanation

Brown (1980b) proposes that SLA is related to stages of acculturation (i.e. the ability of the learner to relate and respond easily to the foreign language culture). Brown identifies 4 stages of acculturation: (1) initial excitement and euphoria; (2) culture shock, leading to the feelings of estrangement and hostility towards the target culture; (3) culture stress, involving a gradual and vacillating recovery; and (4) assimilation or adaptation. Young children are seen as socio-culturally resilient, because they are less culture-bound that adults.

Neufeld (1978) offers a more convincing account of how effective factors are related to age differences in SLA. He distinguishes ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ levels of language. Primarily levels include a reasonably large functional vocabulary, and baic mastery of pronunciation and grammatical rules. Secondary levels include the ability to acquire primarily level. However, children are more likely to achieve secondary levels than adults because they are much more strongly motivated by the need to be accepted by their peer groups. Whereas, the adult is happy to maintain a foreign accent.

2.      Intelligence and aptitude

Learning a L2 in a classroom involves two sets of intellectual abilities. It involves what might be called ‘a general academic or reasoning ability’, it often referred to as intelligence. The other kind of ability consists of specific cognitive qualities needed for SLA, often referred to as aptitude.

Intelligence
It underlies our ability to master and use a whole range of academic skills. McDonough (1981) emphasizes it refers to capacity rather than contents of the mind. That is supposedly measured by intelligences tests. Cummins (1979) distinguishes two kinds of language ability:

1.      Cognitive / academic language ability (CALP); this is a dimension of language proficiency which is strongly related to overall cognitive and academic skills and can be equated with Oller and Perkin’s ‘g’ factor and general intelligence.

2.      Basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS; these are the skill required for oral fluency and also include sociolinguistics aspects of competence. Cummins argues that CALP and BICS are independent and that both sets of abilities are to be found in first and second language acquisition.

Aptitude

It has been suggested that people differ in the extent to which they possess a natural ability for learning an L2. Caroll and Sapon (1985) identify three major components of aptitude:

1.      Phonetic coding ability, which consist of the ability to perceive and memorize new sounds. Or the ability to identify the sounds of a foreign language so that they can be remembered later. Example: To identify the sound which ‘th’ stands for;

2.      Grammatical sensitivity, which is the individual’s ability to demonstrate awareness of the syntactical patterning of sentence of language. Example: the subject and object of a sentence;

3.      Inductive ability, which consists of the ability to notice and identify similarities and differences in both grammatical form and meaning. For example: to recognize that English ‘to’ can denote direction and ‘at’ location;

4.      Rote learning ability, the ability to form and remember associations between stimuli. This is believed to be important in vocabulary learning;

Krashen (1972) distinguishes two aspects of SLA; acquisition and learning. Acquisition is the subconscious internalization of L2 knowledge that occurs through using the L2 naturally and spontaneously. Learning is the conscious study of a L2 that results in knowledge about the rules of the knowledge. Krashen argues that aptitude relates only in learning The effects of aptitude on language learning have been measured in terms of the proficiency level achieved by different classroom learners.

3.      Cognitive Style

Cognitive style is a term used to refer to the manner in which people perceive, conceptualize, organize, and recall information. Each person is considered to have a more or less consistent mode of cogitative functioning.

4.        Attitudes and Motivation

Schumann (1978) lists Attitude as a social factor on a par with variables such as ‘size or learning group’, and Motivation as an affective factor alongside ‘culture shock’.
Gardner & Lambert, 1972: defines Motivation in terms of the L2 learner’s overall goal or orientation, and attitude as the persistence shown by the learner in striving for a goal. They argue that there is no reason to expect a relationship between the two; the type of motivation is distinct from the attitudes displayed to different learner tasks. However, Gardner: 1979 suggest that attitudes are related to motivation by serving as supports of the learner’s overall orientation. Brown, 1981 distinguishes motivation and attitude. He identifies 3 types of motivation:

1.      Global motivation, which consist of general orientation to the goal of learning a L2;

2.      Situational motivation, which varies according to the situation in which learning takes place;

3.      Task motivation, which is the motivation for performing particular learning tasks.

There are also some various kinds of motivation have been identified, they are:

1.      Instrumental motivation, learners may make efforts to learn an L2 for some functional reason to pass examination, to get better job, etc.

2.      Integrative motivation, some learners may choose to learn a particular L2 because they are interested in the people and culture represented by the target language group.

3.      Resultative motivation, an assumption of the research referred to above is that motivation is the cause of L2 achievement. However, it is also possible that motivation is a result of learning. That is, learners who experience success in learning may become more, or in some context, less motivation to learn. This helps to explain the conflicting research result.

4.      Intrinsic motivation, motivation involves the arousal and maintenance of curiosity and can ebb and flow as a result of such factors as learners’ particular interests and the extent to which they feel personality involved to learning activities.

Motivation is clearly a highly complex phenomenon. These four types of motivation should be seen as complementary rather than as distinct and oppositional. Learners can be both integrative and instrumentally motivated at one and the same time. Motivation can result from learning as well as cause it. Furthermore, motivation is dynamic in nature, it is not something that a learner has or does not have but rather something that varies from one moment to the next depending on the learning context or task.

Brown uses the term ‘attitudes’ to refer to the set of believes that the learner holds towards members of the target language group (e.g. whether they are seen as interesting or boring, honest or dishonest, etc) and also toward his own culture. Stern (1983: 376-7) classifies these attitudes into three types:

1.      Attitudes towards the community and people who speak the L2 (i.e. ‘group specific attitudes’);

2.      Attitudes towards learning the language concerned;

3.      Attitudes towards languages and language learning in general.

These attitudes are influenced by the kind of personality of the learner, for instance whether he is ethnocentric or authoritarian. They may be also influenced by the social milieu in which learning takes place. Different attitudes, for instance, may be found in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The results of the empirical research based on Gardner and Lambert’s theoretical framework are mixed and difficult to interpret. The following is a summary of the major findings:

1.      Motivation and attitudes are important factor, which help to determine the level proficiency achieved by different learners;

2.      The effects of motivation/attitudes appear to be separate from the effects of attitude. The most successful learner will be those who have both a talent and a high level of motivation for learning;

3.       In certain situations an integrative motivation may be more powerful in facilitating successful L2 learning, but in other situations instrumental motivations may count for more.

4.      The level and type of motivation is strongly influenced by the social context in which learning takes place, as has ready been noted.

CONCLUSION

Based on the discussion above, IDs classifies into three types: (a) learner beliefs, such as the nature of language learning, how important language learning aptitude is, and which are the best learning strategies; (b) affective states, such as fear versus confidence, or learner anxiety due to learner competitive style; and, (c) general factors, including age, strategy use, learning style, aptitude. As Skhehan (1991) has pointed out there is still no comprehensive theory of IDs in SLA researh. A full theory will need to identify those IDs that are important for successful learning, indicate the relative contribution of particular IDs to learning, specify how IDs interrelate, account for the effect that learning outcomes can have on IDs.

The individual differences among students should be realized by teachers so that the teachers can give the proper treatment to the students.  Based on the theory, there are many aspects of the individual differences. By giving the proper treatments which are suitable with the capacity of students, the students’ competency can be developed maximally.

REFERENCES

Ellis, Rod. 1985. Understanding Second Language  Acquisition, Individual Learner difference and Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dörnyei, Z. & Kormos, J. (2000). The role of individual and social variables in oral task performance. Language Teaching Research, 4, 275-300.

Krashen, S. (1978). Individual variation in the use of the monitor. In W. Ritchie (Ed.), Second Language Acquisition Research: issues and implications (pp. 175-183). New York: Academic Press.

Larsen-Freeman, D., & Long, M. H. (1991). An introduction to second language acquisition research. London: Longman.

Oxford, R. L. (1990b). Styles, strategies, and aptitude: connections for language learning. In T. S. Parry & C. W. Stansfield (Eds.), Language aptitude reconsidered (pp. 67-125). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Skehan, P. (1991). Individual differences in second language learning. Studies in Second Language Learning, 13, 275-298.

Stern, H. H. (1975). What can we learn from the good language learner? Canadian Modern Language Review, 31, 304-318.