Multiple Intelligence and Foreign Language Learning

Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory (MIT) (1983, 1999) is an important contribution to cognitive science and constitutes a learner-based philosophy which is “an increasingly popular approach to characterizing the ways in which learners are unique and to developing instruction to respond to this uniqueness”. MIT is a rationalist model that describes nine different intelligences: the mathematical-logical, the verbal-linguistic, the musical-rhythmic, the bodily-kinesthetic, the interpersonal, the intrapersonal, the visual-spatial, the naturalist and the existential intelligences. It has evolved in response to the need to reach a better understanding of how cognitive individual differences can be addressed and developed in the classroom. The following criteria have been used in MIT to identify intelligence: it “entails the ability to solve problems”, it involves a “biological proclivity”, it has “an identifiable neurological core operation or set of operations” and it is “susceptible to encoding in a symbol system ... which captures and conveys important forms of information”.