ABSTRACT
Aptitude is of obvious practical importance to the enterprise of language learning and teaching. No language teaching professional would doubt that a learner’s aptitude is an important predictor of success and that teachers should take their students’ aptitude into account when deciding on the kind of instruction to be provided. In some cases aptitude carries even more weight because learners are required to take an aptitude test to be accepted into certain training programs. The role of aptitude is also of theoretical importance because it shows what is involved in the learning process and thereby indirectly reveals something about the nature of that process. The concept of aptitude, then, is of crucial importance to just about every area of applied linguistics, from psycholinguistic research on learning processes to a variety of pedagogical and administrative considerations.
