A SUCCESSFUL AND AN UNSUCCESSFUL FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNER: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The study aims to identify the factors affecting success and failure in language learning of successful and unsuccessful learners and investigate their learning strategies. The subjects of the study were two students at School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University. Three data collection instruments, namely a questionnaire, an individual face-to-face interview and an MI test were used. The study indicates that the factors such as motivation, multiple intelligences and learning conditions had strong influences on the two learners’ learning. The questionnaire reveals that the successful learner used learning strategies much more than the unsuccessful learner. The information about learner’s motivation was collected by carrying out a face-to-face interview. While the successful learner was motivated by her family, her love for English, and her future job, the unsuccessful learner exhibited much less motivation. The information about multiple intelligences was collected by asking the two learners to take an MI test. The finding is that multiple intelligence was one of the factors affecting the successful learner’s success and the unsuccessful learner’s failure (The successful learner’s verbal/ linguistic intelligence was 100% while the unsuccessful learner’s was only 10%).