Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners

Abstract

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate.The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture.(McDermott, 1993, p. 295) n The notion of best practices has been a preoccupation in a variety of professional elds including education, management, business, health care, and social work.In the eld of second language acquisition (SLA), interest in discovering and disseminating information about successful activities or practices has had a long history.Carroll (1967) urged investigation of the learning biographies of persons who had been successful in learning more than one language, and Stern (1975), Rubin (1975), and Cohen (1977) all speculated about distinctive learning strategies of good language learners.A particularly in uential study on the characteristics and learning strategies of successful language learners,