Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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8
Individual differences 
in L2 users and L2 
learners
Mostly this book concentrates on the factors that L2 learners have in common.
Teachers usually have to deal with students in groups rather than as individuals;
it is what all the class do that is important. However, at the end of the lesson, the
group turns into 25 individuals who go off to use the second language for their
own needs and in their own ways. Particular features of the learner’s personality
or mind encourage or inhibit L2 learning. The concern of the present chapter is
with how L2 learners vary as individuals, mostly dealing with language in a Lang
5
sense of knowledge in the mind.
This is clearly one difference between first and second language learning. Apart
from a handful of children with specific language impairment (SLI), everybody
manages to learn to speak their first language, more or less by definition – human
language is whatever human beings learn to speak. However, we are all aware of
vast differences in how well people can speak a second language. On the one hand
you have the Czech-born financier Robert Maxwell, who was able to pass for
English, on the other you have Henry Kissinger, forever sounding German. Every
teacher knows that some students will learn a second language effortlessly, others
will struggle for ever. Some of the explanation for this undoubtedly lies in the diff-
erent situations; children learn their L1 naturally in the intimate situations of
their family; school learners learn an L2 formally in the public situation of the
classroom.
However, there still seems to be an element that can only be attributed to 
the individual; some people can, others cannot. Whatever the teaching method
used, some students will prosper, some will not, often despite their best intent-
ions. This chapter will look at some of the ways in which individuals differ that
have been linked to how well they learn a second language in the classroom.
Some have already been seen in Chapter 6: individuals choose for themselves 
how to process or learn language. It should be noted that much of this research 
is applied psychology rather than applied linguistics, making use of concepts 
and measures from psychology rather than from disciplines to do with language.
This sometimes means it treats language teaching as if it were the teaching of 
any other subject on the curriculum, rather than concentrating on its unique
nature.

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Individual differences in L2 users and L2 learners