TESOL Certificate, Part 1: Teach English Now!

Specialization
Arizona State University

Week 03
Lesson 3: Summary and Essential Question – Peer-graded assignment

People with high IQ’s are good language learners

Hello everyone! It’s a pleasure to meet you all. My name is Binoy, and usually go by the nick name Bee. Today, I’ll be
sharing with you what my opinion is, on the essential question, “People with high IQ’s are good language learners”,
my opinion on that statement whether I agree or disagree with it and the reasons to justify my opinion. First off, I
thank all of you in advance for taking your time to review my assignment, and here we go!

Language learning differs from person to person. Some individuals can easily grasps and have quick understanding,
while some other individuals have slow progress in absorbing and adapting. So with that there arises a question, does
having a high IQ have to do with learning a language easily. Well, I don’t really agree with this assumption. Language
learning for all types of individuals need patience, time, outspoken personality and good memory to process and
eventually produce a language. So whether the person is smart or foolish is not what matters but the qualities do
matter. IQ is not the only thing that is needed. What does it take if someone who has high IQ but doesn’t have the
aforesaid qualities, it is still useless. I would like to use Francois Gouin’s story to illustrate this assumption. Francois
Gouin was a professor in Latin and Greek in France. He sounds like a smart guy, doesn’t he? Once he was interested
in learning German and quit his job and went to Germany for a year. He spent days and days studying German words
and decided to test his knowledge. Entering into a university class he listened to a professor speaking in German but
he didn’t even understand a word. He repeated the process and increased the number of words to memorize but still
it did no good to him but rather got penalized by everyone. This isn’t surprising, isn’t it? The mistake was in his learning
strategy and repeating it several times after failing for the first few times but yes he was smart and had a very high IQ.
Sometimes being smart is what makes you foolish.

As educators it is important to remember that teaching a language is not pouring content to the brains of students, it
is often the strategies that we use, the right strategies to give the learners more confidence and encourage them to
take risks. I would rather say it is a process which involves taking the risk of looking foolish. If children are affected by
high affective filter which hurts their ability to learn language, it is our duty to use techniques and help them lower the
affective filter as such; relating to learners, describing mistakes as normal, formative evaluation and be willing to look
ridiculous.

By the above study, it is clear that high IQs don’t help in language learning but is something which makes a person look
smart. So we have to tackle the students by training them to use the appropriate and unique language learning skills
which fits each of them.