English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES 23Indeed, in the late twenticth century, the target language is highly likely to be English;a recent estimate suggests that while around 300 million people speak English as their firstlanguage, another 700 million or so are using it as a second language, or learning to do so(Crystal 1987, p. 358). Certainly it is true that much research on second language learning,whether with children or adults, is conccrned with the learning of English, or with a verysmall number of other languages, mostly European ones (French, German, Spanish). Thereare many multilingual communities today (e.g. townships around many fast-growing cities)where L2 learning involves a much wider range of languages. Howcver, these have beencomparatively little studied.The learner as language processorIt is possible to distinguish three main points of view, or sets of priorities, among SLLresearchers as far as thc learner is concerned. Linguists and psycholinguists have typicallybeen concerned primarily with analysing and modelling the inner mental mechanisms availableto the individual learner, for processing, learning, and storing new language knowledge. Asfar as language learning in particular is concerned, their aim is to document and explain thedevelopmental route along which learners travel. Researchcrs for whom this is the primegoal are less concerned with the speed or rate of development, or indeed with the degreeof ultimate L2 success. Thus they tend to minimizc or disregard social and contextualdifferences among learners; their aim is to document universal mental processes availableto all normal human beings.As we shall see, however, there is some controversy among rescarchcrs in thispsycholinguistic tradition on the question of age. Do child and adult L2 learners learn inessentially similar ways? Or, is thcre a critical uge which divides younger and older learners,a moment when early learning mechanisms atrophy and are replaced or at least supplementedby other compensatory ways of learning? The balance of evidence has been interpretcd byLong (1 990b) in favour of the existence of such a cut-off point, and many other researchersagree with some version of a view that ‘younger better in the long run’ (Singleton 1995,p. 3). However, explanations of why this should be are ?till provisional.Diflerences between individual learnersReal-life observation quickly tells us, however, that evcn if L2 learners can bc shown to befollowing a common developmcntal routc, they differ greatly in the degrce of ultimatesuccess which they achieve. Social psychologists have argued consistently that thesedifferences in learning outcomes must be due to ~ndiv&~I dgerences between learners, andmany proposals have been made concerning the characteristics which supposedly cause thesedifferences.In a recent two-part revicw (1 992, 1993), Gardner and MacIntyre divide what they seeas the most important learner traits into two groups, the cognitive and the afective (emotional).Here we follow their account, and summarize very briefly the factors claimed to havc themost significant influence on L2 learning success. For fuller trcatmcnt of this socialpsychological perspective on learner difference, we would refer the rcader to sources suchas Gardner (1985), Skehan (1989), and Ellis (1994, pp. 467- 560).