THE SOUND OF ONE-HAND CLAPPING - HOW TO SUCCEED IN INDEPENDENT LANGUAGE-LEARNING

This paper describes the self-reported strategies of thirty adults who were independent language learners for a period of six months. Their diaries were classified for attainment as either high achievers or low achievers. High and low achievers showed no significant differences i n overall treatment of the learning materials. However, they differed in their treatment of language itself. The high achievers showed signi ficantly more instances of communication-making and context-making act ivities. In isolation they often created imaginary partners in imagina ry settings and then treated language as a medium of communication rat her than as a subject to be memorized. Creativity and imagination help the independent learner to overcome the pitfalls of isolation. We sug gest that the use of imagined contextualized communication should be r ecommended for classroom language learners to assist with independent study.