There is a great variability in the rates, the routes, the processes, and the outcomes of different individuals' attempts in learning foreign languages. What is responsible for this enormous variation? Is it the learners' affective predisposition, their motivation, their intelligence or other cognitive factors or abilities? A number of studies have provided convincing evidence for the assumption that aptitude is one of the strongest predictors of academic success. For example, in their large-scale survey of individual differences, Ehrman and Oxford (1995) found that aptitude measures were the variables that most strongly correlated with second or foreign language (henceforth L2) proficiency. According to their findings, 25% of individual difference variation can be predicted and explained by aptitude scores. Sparks, Patton, Ganschow, and Humbach (2009) also describe L2 aptitude as the "single best predictor of achievement in an L2" (p. 727). It is thus not surprising that the investigation of language aptitude is considered one of the most promising areas of SLA research. At the same time, there is a great deal of questions to be answered. For instance, it is still not clear how the basic construct language aptitude (henceforth LA) should be conceptualized. Note that while a remarkable amount of effort has been put into the development of tests to measure L2 aptitude, much less work has been invested into defining the underlying construct. Such a defini-1. I dedicate this chapter to Prof. Dr. Brigitte Handwerker (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) on the occasion of her 60 th birthday. Inspired by her work on chunks, I became increasingly interested in aspects such as working memory and analytic ability, which are the two central components of the language aptitude construct discussed in this chapter.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract