[quote=“yamato”][quote=“Buttercup”] Effort is irrelevant; the key factors are intelligence/aptitude for languages and exposure to huge amounts of input at the appropriate level. A lot of research and and my own observation have made this fairly clear to me.
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I agree wit a lot of what you say, but I’m not sure about this.
Key factors are aptitude but certainly not intelligence. I think “effort” certainly is a factor if you translate it into “motivation”.[/quote]
I know it’s not very PC to say it, but the same people who argue for an inclusive, ‘everyone has different strengths and weaknesses’, Gardner-esque educational style also argue that everyone can become competent in difficult foreign languages. It’s not consistent or logical. I don’t mean that some people can’t learn anything, but one of the factors in their reaching a plateau will certainly be their intelligence. This is true for native language speakers too. Not all native speakers can write English competently, despite having access to the same resources. Why deny individual differences?
I’m not saying people shouldn’t try, or should be denied resources, or be labelled ‘stupid’.
Until I was about 13 or 14, I badly wanted to be a ballet dancer (don’t laugh). Through effort and eating disorders, I was competent for a kiddie ballerina. But physically, I’m too short, my feet are the wrong shape, my limbs aren’t long enough. Psychologically, I lost my nerve when I hit puberty. Cognitively, I couldn’t remember long sequences of movement which were easy for the other kids. I was never going to be a pro dancer, but I had a lot of fun until I reached the stage of ‘Why is everyone looking at me?’ Is it that I was simply not focused and motivated enough to develop that part of my brain, or was there a fundamental lack of innate ‘aptitude’ there? Personally, I think aptitude is a way of letting yourself off the hook. Aside from the physical stuff, psychologically, I just lost it, so I blamed the other stuff for my lack of success. ‘I just wasn’t born to be a dancer’ and other shit like that.
It’s the same with any complex endeavour. I really do think that intelligence is intelligence and that ‘Multiple Intelligences’ is garbage. The reason humans have spikes in certain areas is by labelling themselves in certain areas and by motivation/interest in certain areas. Aptitude and intelligence are words which get confused a lot. You’ve talked to the ‘bad at maths’ kids; ‘Oooh! I can’t count with mittens on but I’m GREAT at X’. This comes from labelling by stupid teachers and parents, and laziness/lack of interest. And yes, lack of general intelligence (no value judgement on that. All of us are dumber than someone else. Apart from one person).
Motivation? Yes, you certainly won’t get there without motivation, but if you don’t translate it into effort, which you wouldn’t because it means something else, we all know how many hours Taiwanese students spend ‘learning English’ with very very few progressing beyond the standard East Asian B1 plateau, which is where native speakers of East Asian languages, of normal intelligence and education generally hit a wall. Unfortunately, most of this wasted classroom time is when they are children and have no intrinsic motivation, and inferior cognitive skills. If they freed up their time for play and education, instead of buxiban busywork, and then learned when and if they needed to as teens and young adults, more of them might reach their goals. A motivated, intelligent adult will blast through that wall in a much shorter timescale than a kid will. An adult who signs up for two classes a week will not make that much progress unless they can effectively manage their own learning, which is fairly rare.
All of this is, of course, just my opinion. :blah:
