What sort of person makes an efficient language learner?

ianjamesparsley

Mar 24

"What makes a good language learner?" is a question often asked by linguists and would-be linguists, but it may not quite be the right one.

Let us disappear briefly down a blogpost rabbit hole before returning to it.

Twitter

Last week, a gentleman posted on Twitter than not only is public transport free in Brussels, but there is a "Not the 48" bus which will take you to a random destination if you are feeling that you just need to get out and go somewhere. At the time I scrolled past, he had a perhaps appropriate 48,000 likes. Small wonder, free public transport and innovative ways of promoting mental well-being are always going to go down well with the Twitterati.

There was a small problem. The tweet simply isn't true; indeed, the poster himself admitted that he was just seeing how many people would think it was.

Some people had noticed, but for the most part they were people who had used public transport in Brussels in the previous week and, of course, paid for it. Very few people simply challenged the tweet on the grounds that it just did not seem likely.

This is a common bias - if someone posts something we want to believe, we will voluntarily go along with it even if it lacks even a shred of evidence. Nevertheless, we need to pay attention to the nagging voice in the back of our minds that says, as my father used to express it, "There's something not quite right about this".

Instagram

Last month, a glorious post from 2017 was revived of a "pitch invader" coming on to score the winner in a non-league game for York City with "no one noticing". This was not just a claim, but actually a clip - sure enough, there was a player in a shirt with no number arriving on the left-hand side of the box to rifle in a low drive from 15 yards out at the near post with the clock past 90 minutes. He then ran off around the goal, leaving his identity initially relatively unclear to his colleagues other than the blank back of shirt.

The "likers" and "commenters" lapped it up. What a story that was! Yet surely there was something not quite right about it too?

You will have worked out by now that, well, there was indeed something not quite right about it. In fact, the player scoring the goal had bloodied his numbered shirt earlier in the game and had to change it for a blank one. It took all of ten seconds on google to find that out.

Language learning

What makes a good language learner - if "good" means reasonably quick and reasonably accurate - is primarily motivation, as well as some good techniques (primarily focusing on comprehensible input - reading and listening to as much of the target language as possible, using content that is of interest). However, that is a matter of circumstance more than personality. What if we are concerned about the latter?

If we amend the question to "what type of person makes an efficient language learner?" research has settled on two personality traits. The first, as I have written before, is the capacity to "notice" things.

The second is to be the type of person who immediately thinks "There's something not quite right about this"; the type of person, perhaps, who isn't prepared to accept things as true just because they are convenient.

What is unclear from the research is whether this is just a natural trait or whether, in fact, it can be learned; but there is no reason to assume it is the first of those. It may well be that becoming the sort of person who doesn't just accept things at first reading will also mean becoming the sort of person who learns languages efficiently - being prepared, in other words, to test things and to accept awkward realities when necessary.

Of course, I suspect the two are linked - the person prepared to check things out above and beyond the convenient and the obvious will also be better at "noticing". Fundamentally, that is the answer to the question - however precisely it is phrased!

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