Individual Differences in Second Language Learning

Every teacher knows that learners are notoriously variable in how successful they are at acquiring a new language. This interdisciplinary volume questions what it is that makes each of us good or bad at learning a second language.

• Offers a broad overview of current theories, key findings, and methodological approaches in the field
• Brings together research from language teaching and assessment, psycholinguistics, and the neurobiology of language
• Provides a sound empirical basis for the development of assessment tools and teaching strategies, and sheds new light on the language learning process
• Investigates how people differ from each other in how they approach language learning, and in doing so goes beyond other studies which focus primarily on the behavior of groups of learners

LEAH ROBERTS is currently Chair in Education at the University of York, where she leads the Centre for Language Learning Research. Previously, after obtaining her PhD in Language and Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK, she worked in the Language Acquisition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in projects on multilingual processing and information structure. She has researched a range of topics in language learning and processing, with a major focus on real-time sentence and discourse processing in second language learners.

ANTJE MEYER studied psychology and social sciences at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum (Germany) and obtained a PhD from the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands). She was a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Birmingham (UK) until she took up an appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Much of her work has concerned aspects of language production and the relationships between specific linguistic and general cognitive processes such as visual attention, executive control, and working memory. Recently she has started to investigate the origins of individual differences in language processing, the main focus of her new research group.