Bad Language Learners: What Are They? Any ...

Igolkina N. Bad Language Learners: What are they? // "Festival of Teaching, Festival of Nate ": Proceedings of the 20th NATE-Russia International Conference, Voronezh, April 23-26, 2014 / [ed. by Larisa Kuzmina, Marina Sternina]; National Association of Teachers of English; Voronezh State University. - Voronezh: Publishing House VSU, 2014. - pp. 89-90. ISBN 978-5-9273-2122-3. Тир. 270.

Bad Language Learners: What Are They? Any experienced teacher remembers better the learners who demonstrated excellent results during their studies and those who could not cope with learning. The former are always the pride and joy of teachers while the latter are usually in majority and often become a challenge for their language instructors. But in spite of the fact that learners’ difficulties and ways to overcome them are considered to be one of the main professional targets of language teachers the scholars in theory of second language acquisition dwells on the concept of a “good language leaner” but not a “bad language learner”. In these studies the authors focuses their attention on the characteristics which distinguish successful learner from unsuccessful ones and in this way “bad learners” are those who do not demonstrate characteristics of high proficiency learners. The investigators interested in this topic (Rubin, Naiman et al, Reiss, Huang and Van Naersson, Oxford and others) have worked out a number of methods to gain information on the subject matter. These are classroom observations, personal interviews, written questionnaires, think aloud protocols and some others. We suppose that these methods can be fruitful in case of studying characteristics of “bad language learners” and reasons of their failure. We think that theoretical investigation will be of practical use if they try to give answers to the following questions: 1. What is a definition of a “bad language learner”? 2. What are the peculiarities of their learning activity and what language learning strategies they tend to use and which they avoid? 3. Are there any characteristics of their learner language? 4. What are personal characteristics of a “bad language learner”? During our research we have conducted a number of surveys among both English language teachers and their learners. The analysis of the collected data let us make several conclusions. Firstly, a “bad language learner” can be defined in two ways: 1. This is a learner who fails to achieve sufficient result in spite of the fact that they demonstrate ability to gain high language proficiency. In teachers answers such learners mostly are characterized as “lazy”. 2. This is a learner who is a low efficient student. Such learners can demonstrate necessary proficiency only thanks to their painstaking and

patient efforts to achieve such a certain outcome. In teachers answers such learners mostly are characterized as “hardworking”. Secondly, language learners can be “good” at some skills (for example, reading and writing) and completely fail at others (for example, speaking and listening). In other cases some students can use a wide range of a certain type of language strategies (for example cognitive strategies) which help them to compensate the lack of others (for example metacognitive) and demonstrate a high level of proficiency. So, not only a range of learning strategies as learning tools matters but the effective use of the language learning strategies in different learning environment and for different tasks can be crucial. The study of a learner language can also become a source of information about language learners. The type of errors and mistakes as well as peculiarities of the learner language can be used to make a portrait of a language learner.