What makes a good learner and how to assess levels?

This week's reading is so stuffed with information that I literally don't know what to reflect on first of all.

1) The L&S chapter focused on the characteristics of a good language learner, covering it in a very similar way to last week's peanut butter chapter. I have a hard time relating my own experience to the chapter, because I learned English as a kid, so I don't remember most part of it. It is my personal, yet anti-scientific opinion that there is such thing as talent or inclination to a particular kind of cognition. I am a pretty good humanities learner. Languages, literature, history - I get it. It makes sense to me. Math/physics/chemistry - not so much. I can understand the simplest concepts, but it requires incommensurable amounts of effort on everyone's behalf. And by this I don't mean to undermine the importance of other factors. Even the most talented person in the world will never succeed without motivation, willingness to communicate and make mistakes etc, it's just that sometimes people with similar learning profiles have different progress patterns.

I also strongly support the theory about correlation of IQ to language learner success. It may not be such an important factor with children, but with adults, and the focus on abstract notions we have to make, it is certainly playing its role. I also found that the there was direct link between amount of formal instruction students had in their native language and their success in our project. It was a joy, if not a class holiday, to have people who actually know the difference between verbs and nouns, or *gasp* subjects and predicates. Students from Korea and Japan were a bliss in that respect.

2) The peanut butter book chapters focused on teaching strategies pertaining to certain ages and standards for determining levels. The project I worked for last year used CASAS system. CASAS stands for Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System. It was developed in California, and the first "C" originally referred to the state. Anyway, California was one of the first states to get a big influx of non-English speaking population, so they had to design an assessment and instruction system to address the needs of these people. Hence, they developed a system of competencies that describe the functional command of English and tests to measure success of competence mastering. So far CASAS has tests for reading(30-s and 80-s series) and listening (50-s series). Last year we were piloting a new listening test series, with modernized content; the original tests required knowledge or words like "aerogram", which nobody uses now. CASAS is a really good system to rely on if you're teaching adults, who need functional language, and if you have a textbook to go with it (my personal favorite is All Stars).