Learning Styles and Language Learning Strategies

Recent research

More recent research has examined language learner strategies in more context-specific situations,^[9] rather than catch-all categories. That is, when learners study academic writing, for example, they are likely to deploy a different set of strategies than if they were to study daily conversation. The terms cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies remain common in strategy research, but others related to managing a learners' own affective state or social environment have been examined under the umbrella term self-regulation

This article is not about me. I wish it were, but my experiences of learning foreign languages have been pretty dismal.  I scraped through ‘O’ level French and German at school, and only managed to acquire an intermediate level of Portuguese, after spending three years working in Brazil.  In sharp contrast, my American friend, Sarah, has accumulated languages throughout her life, and began learning Portuguese in her late twenties, quickly becoming fluent.  This made me ask the question “What made her experiences so successful, and why do I find learning languages so difficult?”.  I decided to try to find out, and then see if what I learnt could be applied to the classroom.

I wrote an extensive questionnaire for Sarah to discover her background, her previous learning experiences, and the strategies that she uses when learning a foreign language. Once she returned it to me, I asked numerous follow-up questions to gain a deeper insight into her experiences. 
These are the factors which I believe have aided in her learning experiences:
i) Age
Sarah did not know any Portuguese until her late twenties, when she went to live in Brazil. Her experience then could challenge the critical hypothesis theory which suggests that there is a particular time around puberty when a learner is most likely to have success in language learning. Clearly, other factors must be considered when attempting to understand how an adult learner has managed to acquire such a high level of English, and it should not be assumed therefore that a learner cannot begin to learn a language in adulthood, and attain proficiency.