L2 Learning & Successful

Summary: According to Mitchell and Myles,( the second language learners are people who embark on the learning of an additional language. the learners may be childer, or adults. they may acquired L2 ( Second Language) from a schools, works, or through the community by being with native speakers. "Indeed, in the late twentieth century, the target is highly likely to be English; a recent entmate suggests that while around 300 million people speak English as their first language, another 700 million or so are using it as a scond language, or learning to do so." ( crystal 1987,p.358). Also, the learner as language processor shows that Linguists and Psycholinguists have typically been concerned primarily with analysing and modelling the inner mental mechanisms available to the individual learner for processing, learning, and storing new language knowledge. As we sall see, there is some controversy among researchers in this psycholingusistc tradition on the question of age. Do child and adult L2 learners learn in essentially similar way? or , is there a critical age which divides younger and older learners.The balance of evidence has been interpreted by long (1990b) in favour of the existence of a better in the long run (Singleton 1995, P.3). Also, the book shows that there are differences between individual learners. In a recent two-part review (1992, 1993), Gardner and Maclntyre divide what they see as the most important learner traits into two groups. The first one is COGNITIVE which is evidence some factors. Intelligence: there is clear evidence that L2 students who are above average on formal measures of intelligence and/or general academic attainment tend to do well in L2 learners, at least in formal classroom settings. Language aptitude: 'Modern Language Aptitude Test' assesses a number of sub skills believed to be predictive of L2 learning success like phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, memory abilities, and inductive language learning ability. Language Learners Strategies: much research has been done to describe and categorize the strategies used by learners at the different levels, and to link strategy use to learning outcomes. The other group is AFFECATIVE which is also evidence some factors as well. Language Attitudes: social psychologists have long been interested in the idea that the attitudes of the learner towards the target language, its speakers, and the learning context, may all play some part in explaining success or lack of it. Motivation: for Gardner and Maclntyre, the motivation individual "is one who wants to achieve a particular goal, devotes considerable effort to achieve this goal, and experiences satisfaction in the activities associated with achieving this goal" (1993, P 2). Language Anxiety: "is seen as a stable personality trait referring to the propensity for individual to react in nervous manner when speaking in the second language" (1993, P 3))..... (P 17-20)

Personal Response: I do agree with the author and I like the ways she described them but there was a point which I don't agree with it. "Younger = better in the long run", it might be true but what I believe that if someone had a goal or a target, he or she would fight in order to get that goal, and it doesn't matter how old is he or she. If we took the English Language as an example for a second language, I think we would consider a strategies that we should go through them. So, the age has nothing with it. It's about how much we need to learn and how. For example, let's say there are two persons (young boy and old man) and both of them want to learn English as a second language and they both started from level 1 then after a few months, the young boy stopped going to the school and thought he had enough of learning English but the old man kept going so who do you think is going to be better than other?? However, the author mentioned a lot of strategies and ways to how we can learn a second language and I believe that all of them are helpful to us.