The Good Language Learner

This book considers the strategies used by successful language learners, in the light of current thinking and research.

This book is one of the most influential research studies on Second Language Learning ever undertaken. The Good Language Learner addresses key problems for teachers about the strategies that successful learners use, the attitudes they show to the language they are learning, the nature of their most successful experiences and similar issues. It is based on the direct experience of a wide range of learners. It enables us to recognise the combined roles of fluency activity and natural communication on the one hand, and accuracy activity with formal understanding of the language system and the mistakes that one is liable to make as a learner, on the other hand. Few works of empirical analysis in language teaching have had so much influence, and this edition should be an essential component of any teacher's library in local authority centres, schools, teacher education institutions, and the home library of language teachers.

Describes the goals of foreign language study, discusses the nature of language, and recommends strategies for studying

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

The scope of individual learner differences is broad, yet there is no current, comprehensive, and unified volume that provides an overview of the considerable amount of research conducted on various language learner differences, until now.

KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351049139, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume offers an exhaustive look at the latest research on metacognition in language learning and teaching. While other works have explored certain notions of metacognition in language learning and teaching, this book, divided into theoretical and empirical chapters, looks at metacognition from a variety of perspectives, including metalinguistic and multilingual awareness, and language learning and teaching in L2 and L3 settings, and explores a range of studies from around the world. This allows the volume to highlight a diverse set of methodological approaches, including blogging, screen recording software, automatic translation programs, language corpora, classroom interventions, and interviews, and subsequently, to demonstrate the value of metacognition research and how insights from such findings can contribute to a greater understanding of language learning and language teaching processes more generally. This innovative collection is an essential resource for students and scholars in language teaching pedagogy, and applied linguistics.