MSI Press Blog

  Most of us know the classic fable of the tortoise and the hare: the quick and confident hare bursts ahead, only to tire out, while the slow but steady tortoise trudges forward and eventually wins the race. What if I told you this same dynamic plays out in language learning? According to research by Leaver (1986) with diplomat students at the Foreign Service Institute, learners tended to follow one of these two paths based on their learning styles, as measured by the Torrance Test of Hemisphericity (left-brain learners and right-brain learners). The left-brain learners, referred to by Leaver as tortoises, started slowly, and plodded along with multiple short-term plateaus. These were the same types of learners who tested as ectenic on the later-developed, more sophisticated E&L Cognitive Styles Construct tool. The right-brain learners, referred to as hares, skipped merrily off, without plateauing, until reaching the pre-professional level, and then they reached a very long pla...

  Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Cognitive Styles A few cognitive styles have bee referred to and defined earlier (or footnoted). There are many kinds and systems of understanding cognition that have been proposed over the past 3-4 decades. The one I use in this book is the E&L Cognitive Style Construct (Ehrman & Leaver, 2002; Leaver, 2019). I have chosen it principally because it encompasses many other systems—the reason it was designed: to simplify the proliferating models floating around academic programs. [1] For this book, it provides an easy overview of styles because the E&L subordinates ten subscales [2] to two overarching categories, which make it easier and simpler to use as a first-step instrument. Cognition refers to the way people process information. After perceiving new information (through one or another sensory preference), a learner must process it, encoding it for memory. The effectiveness of how tha...

Excerpt from Practices That Work by Thomas Jesus Garza.  Be Sensitive to Learning Styles   Betty Lou Leaver (Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center) Madeline Ehrman (Foreign Service Institute) Teachers working with language learners at all levels have for some decades now recognized that learners have specific sensory and cognitive preferences when it comes to learning and specific ways of interacting with classmates. These individual differences can be very important both in positive and negative ways in the language process, the significance of which may change as one progresses up the ladder of proficiency. One phenomenon that has been observed by language teachers and their learners over time is the “tortoise and hare” syndrome. Learners who are painfully accurate—and therefore slow— in the beginning of language study often outdistance their faster peers who can plateau at the Advanced/Superior threshold because they have become comfortable wi...