The L2 Learners Introduction: When teaching a second language, you need to consider who the learners are. What is their ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage? What are their native languages, levels of education, and socioeconomic characteristics? What life experiences have they had that might affect their learning? What are their intellectual capacities, abilities, strengths, and weaknesses? How would you describe the personality of any given learner? These and other questions focus attention on some of the crucial variables affecting both learners' successes in acquiring a foreign language and teachers' capacities to enable learners to achieve that acquisition. According to Abas (2025), every human has individual characteristics or personal characteristic that can contribute to language acquisition. Those characteristics are age, gender, intelligence, aptitude, motivation and attitude, personality, learning styles and environment. Factors and characteristics of second language learners Intelligence - Intelligence has traditionally been used to refer to performance on certain kinds of tests. These tests are often associated with success in school and a link between intelligence and second language learning has sometimes been reported. - IQ scores were a good means of predicting success in second language learning. So basically, being intelligent is a good characteristic a person can possess in order to be successful in learning the second language. - It was found that Intelligence was related to the development of second language reading, grammar, and vocabulary. - Intelligence may be a strong factor when learning involves language analysis and rule learning. Intelligence involves: • Ability to identify and memorize new sounds • Ability to understand the function of particular words in sentences • Ability to figure out grammatical rules • Memory for new words Age - Age is one of the factors that influence second language learning. It is generally believed that children are better at languages than adults. - Children learn better through play while adults are comfortable with abstract learning and are more analytical. Gender - Male and female have distinguishable ways of speaking and those distinctions make up the gender aspect of language characteristics. - Girls may be socialized early into a socioemotional orientation emphasizing emotional expressivity making them more socially mature than boys. Aptitude - The ability to study or perform in a particular area naturally. A person frequently possesses a variety of aptitudes that combine to enable them to excel in particular occupations. - There are different types of aptitude. One of those is language aptitude. Language aptitude refers to the ability/potential of an individual to acquire a language. Motivation and Attitudes - Motivation and attitude provide primary impetus to initiate learning language 2 (hereafter L2) and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process. - Positive motivation is associated with a willingness to keep learning. - Attitudes are internal states that influence what the learners likely to do. The internal state is some degree of positive/negative or favorable / unfavorable reaction towards an object. Learning Styles - Learning style according to Reid (1995) refers to an “individual's natural, habitual and preferred way of absorbing, processing and retaining new information and skills”. It is the uniqueness of how each learner receives and processes new information through their senses. There are 4 predominant Learning Styles: Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic. - Kinesthetic Learners Integration of movement and whole-body learning: role-playing, acting, dancing, playing, sports, and exercise - Auditory Learners Auditory learning style – this means you learn by hearing and listening. You will: Enjoy discussions and talking things through and listening to others. - Visual Learners Being a visual learner entails thinking in pictures rather than in words. Visual learners learn best by utilizing graphs, tables, charts, maps, colors and diagrams. Read and Write Learners They learn primarily by reading and writing. They prefer to learn information by reading notes, handouts and textbooks. These learners make use of dictionaries and other reference materials. Personality - A number of personality characteristics have been proposed as likely to affect second language learning. Different theories hold that personality significantly influence the degree of success that individuals achieve in learning a second language (Gass & Selinker, 1994) based on the assumption that some features of the learner's personality might encourage or inhibit second language learning. - Language studies have been taken in order to try to explain the effects of introverts versus extroverts on language learning. Many second language teachers feel that students with outgoing personalities are more likely to be successful as a second language learner than a less outgoing personality. A number of language teachers also believe that the extroverts will create more situations to engage in conversation in the target language. Environment - Environment affects both physical and psychological conditions of second language learners. - Two types of linguistics environment Artificial or formal environments Informal environments. Formal linguistic environment is a language learning where second language learners acquired proficiency of the language in a school based context. Informal linguistic environment is grounded in the context outside the classroom exposure of the target language. Krashen and Seliger noted that features such as rule isolation and feedback do not seem to be present in informal environments. - Both formal and informal environments can contribute to a second language learner. Informal environments provide necessary input for acquisition while the formal or classroom environments aids increasing learned competence. According to Lightbown & Spada in 2001, informal setting is considered as the context in which language learners are exposed to the target language at school, home, and work or in social interaction and formal setting as the context where the target language is being taught to a group of second or foreign language learners. Why are some learners more successful than others? Social context - Social context exerts a marked incidence in the language learning and teaching of L2. According to Stern (2003), social context is compounded by a group of social or environmental factors, which exercise a powerful influence in the process of language learning - Features of social context which affect degree of success include the status of L1 and L2, boundary and identity factors within and between the L1 and L2 speech communities, and institutional forces and constraints. These macrosocial factors influence L2 learning primarily because of their impact on attitude and opportunity. They also determine whether the L2 is being learned as a second language, a foreign language, an auxiliary language, or a language for specific purposes. Social experience - Do you remember how children acquire their native language? Or do you remember how you acquire your native language? It is because of our experiences, because of the people around us. Interacting with people in person and being exposed to the environment in which those people use the language is essential for us to learn it - Research shows that social interaction or social experiences facilitates lexical and phonological development at the early stages of child language acquisition. - Quantity and quality of L2 input and interaction are determined by social experience, and both have significant influence on ultimate success in L2 learning. Because social variables are complex and often impossible to control, there is very little experimental evidence to support this conclusion. However, correlational and anecdotal evidence abounds, and it is quite convincing Relationship of L1 and L2 - All languages are learnable, but not all L2s are equally easy for speakers of particular L1s to acquire. Knowledge of L1 is an important component of all L2 competence in its initial state, but the genetic, typological, and historical relationships of L1 and L2 will yield differential possibilities for positive transfer of parameter settings and surface-level features, including vocabulary and writing system. The relationship between the two languages is crucial because it defines the very nature of second language acquisition: if L2 acquisition did not differ in some way from L1 acquisition, SLA research would be merely a sub‑field of language acquisition research rather than a field of its own. References Abas, S. (2015). Individual Characteristics In Second Language. State University of Yogyakarta. L2 Learning and Teaching. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2023, from liduaeka.weebly.com: https://liduaeka.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/7/6/10761275/ch_7_l2_learning_and _teaching.pdf Zafar, S., & Meenakshi, K. (2012). Individual Learner Differences and Second Language Acquisition: A Review. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 3(4). . Retrieved March 2023, from https://doi.org/10.4304/jltr.3.4.639-646
