A Psycholinguistic Study Of The Learners' Individual Differences In Foreign Language Teaching

This thesis is a tentative probe into foreign language teaching, by making use of some up-to-date psycholinguistic evidence and theories, trying to link theory into practice. It is divided into five chapters: Chapter 1 deals with beliefs, including learners' beliefs and teachers' beliefs; Chapter 2 discusses anxiety, its cause and effect and ways to identify it; Chapter 3 considers motivation; Chapter 4 looks at language aptitude; and the last chapter talks about learning styles and strategies. Each chapter discusses the data provided by a number of previous surveys of the field and focuses on what such data can tell us about the nature of language and thus its implications for the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Such a picture should, it is hoped, help those engaged in language learning and teaching to see what factors need to be considered if they are to learn/teach a language effectively.