The Principal made five major points in his lecture to the foreign students.

The topic I’d like to deal with this morning is what makes a good language learner. This is an eternal problem, and one to which there is no real solution. I would however like you to think about the situation of learners outside the classroom because in many ways it would be true to say that there are more people in the world who speak a foreign language or a second language who didn’t learn it in a classroom than there are who did and I think this awareness of the success of out-of-classroom learning provides us with a key to how in-classroom learning can be successful.
    Let us look then at the characteristics of a good language learner. I think motivation is certainly going to be very high on our list. Obviously there are different kinds of motivation; there is what we call instrumental motivation, this is the kind of motivation which in theory persuades a school pupil to learn a language in order to pass an examination—it’s external motivation, something which is imposed on the learner. The opposite of this is integrative motivation, the kind of motivation which gets an immigrant in a country or someone who’s married to a speaker of another language to master the tongue much more rapidly than someone learning in a classroom. Arguably, most people possess mixed motivation although it would appear from research that integrative motivation does give much better results, certainly as far as speed of learning goes.
    Personality is obviously another major factor to be home in mind—not necessarily, I’m not necessarily saying that you need—er how shall I say?—extroverts to learn a foreign language, but someone who has the confidence to make mistakes is always going to learn much more quickly than someone who is afraid to experiment.
    Intelligence isn’t a factor, I feel, in language learning—I would prefer to use the term learning skills. Learning skills are those abilities which make one person progress at a much faster speed than the others; they include having a good ear, efficient revision, being able to monitor your own speech, and suitable organization of learning generally.
    However, if we go back to our starting point, which was the great, the much greater number of speakers of languages who have learnt outside classrooms I think they gives us the key to what I believe is the most important factor, and dig’s independence. A learner who frees himself or herself from the tyranny of the teacher and the classroom and who makes use of twenty-four hours a day for learning, who, in short, accepts responsibility for learning, is always gong to be not just a good language learner but the best. Conversely, someone who won’t accept this responsibility is always going to remain at what we call a plateau—they’ve failed to make progress and blame their teachers. In reality it is themselves that they should blame.