Qualities of Successful Language Learners

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QUALITIES OF SUCCESSFUL LANGUAGE LEARNERS Qualities of a successful language learner’s Age: Age variation in English learning and learning differences between children and adults are significant factors that must be taken into account in choosing the right approaches, design and procedures. In the survey it has been found that those respondents who had some exposure to English language in their childhood managed to acquire good communication skills. Infants are born as universal receivers of all language sounds, but this ability slowly disappears, as they grow old. So early childhood experiences aid the learners in acquiring good English successfully in later life. Immersion: Immersion is a method of learning new language by the exclusive use of the target language. An interesting observation this author had made in his survey is some learners learnt English with almost a fanatic zeal. They completely immersed themselves in English, rarely communicating with anyone in other than English. They completely avoided those things that may distract their attention like bi-lingual dictionaries and materials intended to teach English through their mother tongue. Two important goals of immersion programme are:  To develop proficiency in the Second language  To develop empathy for the second language culture This second goal is important to note, as it appears to be one of the strategies of successful language learners Intelligence: Some people possess an innate talent to acquire new languages. Such people have more linguistic intelligence. Their high linguistic intelligence may be partly due to their early language learning experiences. This intelligence is likely to help them in continually developing their language... ... middle of paper ... ... is not frequently heard nowadays. Most native-speaker teachers do not have this accent but still use phonemic symbols. When the symbols are arranged in a chart, each one occupies a box. This indicates that the real sound that you actually hear can vary up to certain limits, depending on the influence of other sounds and on individual ways of speaking. There is not just one perfect way to say each sound - there is an acceptable range of pronunciations. Think of the pieces in a game of chess. They can vary considerably in size, shape and appearance but we can always recognize a knight because it behaves like a knight and not like a king. The point is that words such as 'ship', sheep', 'sip' and 'seep' should sound different from each other, not that each sound is pronounced exactly like the sounds of RP. Spoken English classes result in only superficial learning:

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