1 SLA and Individual Differences: An Overview

The introductory chapter summarizes the background and rationale for this volume. It illustrates how the current volume expands on previous publications with new and distinctive features. In particular, important individual differences (IDs) of age, intelligence, aptitude, working memory, attention, strategies, meta-cognition, self-regulation, anxiety, reading, and writing as well as L2 learning difficulties are featured as they have not been discussed so systematically. In essence, this volume provides systematically organized (as its subtitle indicates, theories, assessment, research, and pedagogy), comprehensive and in-depth reviews on each of the key IDs believed to play an important role in SLA.