Chapter four from Saville-Troike had some interesting points about what affects learners have on themselves as far as critical period hypothesis and information processing but what I found most pertinent to me was the section on learning strategies and the discussion on how a person personality can legitimately affect their ability to learn a language.
They talked about three specific strategies:
Metacognitive: which is previewing a concept or principle in anticipation of learning the activity.
Cognitive: which is a repetition of information, use of inference, and relation to the native tongue to learn.
Social/affective: getting involved in opportunities to speak the language with native speakers. Obtaining feedback, questioning to get clarification, etc.
Most interesting to me is finding myself in these definition. Considering I am a much more introverted person I find myself being meta cognitive about learning the Spanish language but, at the same time, I try, to the best of my ability, to reach out and practice with native speakers to keep up my Spanish. This more extroverted side may have been brought out after my study abroad experiences but I find it interesting that a learner can be a part of all three learning strategies which all have their differences based on the individual personality and cognitive style.
I always love learning about new theories and categories that all students must fit into and fall under because they account for the student as an individual. Reality is taken into account for what should happen and what actually happens and at the core is the individual student left to wander around for a category to be placed into. (kind of goes back to grouping in high school - preps, jocks etc..) I don't buy it.
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