Learning Styles and Language Learning Strategies

ii) Exposure to foreign languages in infancy
When Sarah was a baby, her parents took her to Ethiopia for a year, and this is where she was first exposed to a foreign language – Amharic. Despite being so young, she learnt to baby-talk in both English and Amharic simultaneously, which happened, according to Werker (1995), because infants are born as “universal receivers” of all language sounds. Werker argues that this ability slowly disappears in that first year, but Ratey (2001) claims that it remains for three years. After returning to the States, Sarah was enrolled in an alternative kindergarten, where she was taught some words and phrases in French, German and Spanish.  These early childhood experiences may have aided Sarah in acquiring another foreign language so successfully in later life. 
It could also be suggested that the acquisition of several foreign languages at a young age may have improved her intellectual development, by, for example, promoting a solid mastery of her first language, and also by making her aware of the learning process (Holman, 1998).  
iii) Immersion
In addition to learning French at school, twice a year Sarah would spend extended periods in Montreal, and in Grade 8 spent a full year there. She studied at a school where most of her lessons were in English, but she would also have History and Geography lessons entirely in French, in addition to her regular French class.
Two important goals of this kind of partial immersion programme are:
· to develop proficiency in the foreign language
· to develop empathy for the second language culture
This second goal is important to note, as it is one of the strategies of successful language learners put forward by Stern (1975).
Immersion is something Sarah clearly sought out as a tool for acquiring a foreign language.   She spent a month in France when she was a teenager, and participated in an intensive Spanish programme in Guatemala in her early twenties. She also conducted anthropological field-work there, and eventually became fluent in Spanish, so much so that many native-speakers of Spanish believed that she had a Latin American background. As for Portuguese, she did not know a word before she went to Brazil, although her Spanish background may have aided her in picking up the language so quickly.  She fully immersed herself in the language once she arrived, rarely communicating with anyone in English, other than her husband, and the occasional native-speaker of English.
However, she did not neglect her mother-tongue, and used it as a tool for understanding Portuguese at a deeper level, by drawing grammatical parallels, and for saving time, until she was able to use monolingual dictionaries and, eventually, begin to think in the L2.