Learning Styles and Language Learning Strategies

x) Other Factors 
· Mimicry 
Sarah can easily copy different accents, both in English and in Portuguese.  She is often mistaken for a native speaker of Portuguese. Moulton (1966) suggests that most people have the ability to mimic foreign sounds, but only those with a low inhibition, like Sarah, will actually get results.   
· Musical Ability 
Sarah has an ear for music, and can sing well, and she suggests that this may account for her minimal foreign accent in all of the languages she has learnt. Intuition tells us that a person who has a good musical ability may have an advantage in language learning, but it is not a factor mentioned in the popular literature on this subject.  In fact, there is no evidence to suggest a correlation between musical ability and foreign language ability (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2002).
Conclusion
It is not only impossible to discover every reason why Sarah is such a successful language learner, but also to be sure of which traits or strategies have actually helped her.  Below are some of the factors which are likely to contribute to her success as a language learner, but any one of them on their own may be negligible:
General 
· She had language-learning experiences at a very young age.
· She has experienced periods of immersion.
· She is female.
· She is from a middle-class background.
· She is intelligent.
· She has a proven high aptitude for languages that share common roots with English.
· Her own culture is not too distant from the target-language culture.
· She is good at mimicry. 
Personality 
· She has low inhibition.
· She is self-confident, assertive, alternately spontaneous and cautious, strong-willed, interested, opinionated, passionate, intellectual, creative, stubborn, energized, out-going and talkative. 
Motivation 
· She is a motivated learner.
· She does not generally get anxious when learning a language.
· She seeks out opportunities to practise. 
Strategies 
· She is empathic with the target language culture.
· She uses her mother-tongue as a tool for learning a foreign language.
· She has a mostly visual style of learning.
· She looks for patterns in the language.
· She draws grammatical parallels between the L1 and L2.
· She uses mnemonic techniques.
· She is a good and willing guesser.
· She monitors her learning.
· She thinks in the L2.
· She talks to herself in the L2.
· She repeats words in her head and out loud. 
· She uses a variety of techniques to get her message across, like circumlocution, etc.
· She tolerates ambiguity in the language.
· She analyses the language.
· She analyses what she and other speakers say.
· She labels objects to help her remember them.
· She is constantly searching for meaning. 
It is not possible to say to what extent these potential reasons have contributed to her success, or which ones are more important that the others.  These results do, however, generally confirm the characteristics of a successful language learner that have been described in literature.  However, Sarah is not a systematic organizer or learner, and likes to describe her learning experiences as “organic”.  In addition, she learnt Portuguese in adulthood, contradicting the now well-criticized critical hypothesis theory, demonstrating that all language learners are different, and that age is only one possible factor of many.  It follows then that it cannot be assumed that these conclusions, or those of other researchers, are valid across all learners.