Second Language Acquisition Theories and Teaching Practice: How Do They Fit?

AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-TWO, MY DAUGHTER then a college senior was diagnosed as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, a learning disability characterized, in her case, by short attention span, easy distractability, poor motor coordination, poor handwriting, and inconsistent spelling.' Results of the WoodcockJohnson Psycho-Educational Battery indicated above average verbal ability and reading aptitude, but a severe deficit in visual perceptual speed, and below average scores in math and written language aptitude. All other abilities tested, such as broad cognitive ability, reasoning, memory, and knowledge aptitude, were well within the average ranges. You may wonder about the relevance of my daughter's learning disability to the topic of this paper. Of interest is that, as a result of that learning disability diagnosis, my daughter received a waiver for requirements in mathematics and foreign languages. Still more interesting is, however, that my daughter-whose psychological test profile indicates apparently little talent for learning a foreign language--is functionally trilingual. She has native fluency in English, rates probably a "terminal two" on the ILR Scale in German, and about a 1 + in Spanish.2 When she was diagnosed as lacking foreign language learning aptitude, she had already fulfilled her language requirement and was enrolled in a third-year Spanish composition course with which she did, however, have major problems. A superficial examination of the facts reported may lead one to doubt the construct and predictive validities of the psychological tests used to determine learning disabilities. How, after all, can an individual who has acquired a functional proficiency in two nonprimary languages be suddenly considered as lacking in foreign language learning aptitude? A closer look at my daughter's second language learning history may provide some explanation for the apparent inconsistency. My daughter acquired German as a "mother tongue." That is, the language spoken to her by her mother up to about age seven was predominantly German. In addition to the input she received from her mother in the US, she spent an average of about six weeks annually in Germany during her early childhood. Since the age of seven, English became with rare exceptions the exclusive language in the home. My daughter did, however, continue to spend intermittent summer vacations with German relatives. The two times she attempted to "learn" German as a foreign language in high school and college she did not do particularly well. At the time I gave the fault for her mediocre performance to the teachers whoin my opinion--were unable to deal with her superior conversational fluency within the constraints of a grammar-oriented classroom. My daughter's efforts to learn Spanish started in high school, but she dropped the course because she found the highly analytical grammatical approach boring. She then took the first two semesters at the university, completing both courses with a grade of C. After her year of elementary college Spanish she spent one summer in an intensive study program in Mexico, and the following summer holding summer employment in Costa Rica. To make a long story short, my daughter has been successful in acquiring three languages in a predominantly natural acquisition environment but has considerable problems learning a language in a formal school setting where the instructional goals, activities, and tests emphasize analysis and mastery of the grammatical code. Her experience has led me to reexamine The Modern Language Journal, 75, i (1991) 0026-7902/91/0001/017 $1.50/0 ?1991 The Modern LanguageJournal