Multiple Intelligences as Strategy for Teaching EFL to high school graduates

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intelligence across species and within the human species . Francis Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin) was perhaps the first psychologically oriented scientist to try to measure the intellect directly. Though

Galton (1870) had a theoretical interest in the concept of intelligence, his work was by no means unrelated to practical issues. A committed eugenicist, he sought to measure intelligence and hoped, through proper "breeding," to increase the overall intelligence of the population. During the following half century, many of the most gifted and influential

psychologists concerned themselves with the nature of human intelligence. Although a few investigators were interested principally in theoretical issues, most seasoned their concerns with a practical orientation. Thus, Binet and Terman developed the first general-purpose intelligence tests in their respective countries; Yerkes and Wechsler created their own influential instruments. Even scientists with a strong

theoretical bent, like Spearman and Thurstone , contributed either

directly or indirectly to the devising of certain measurement techniques and the favoring of particular lines of interpretation. By midcentury, theories of intelligence had become a staple of psychology textbooks, even as intelligence tests were taken for granted in many industrialized countries.

Still, it is fair to say that, within scientific psychology, interest in issues of intelligence waned to some extent. Although psychometricians continued to perfect the instruments that purported to measure human intellect and some new tests were introduced , for the most part, the burgeoning interest in cognitive matters bypassed the area of intelligence. This divorce between mainstream research psychology and the "applied area" of intelligence might have continued indefinitely, but by the late 70s, there were signs of a reawakening of interest in theoretical and research aspects of intelligence. With his focus on the information-processing aspects of items in psychological tests, Robert

Sternberg was perhaps the most important catalyst for this shift,

but researchers from a number of different areas of psychology have joined in this rediscovery of the centrality of intelligence . The Theory of Multiple Intelligences A decade ago, Gardner found that his own research interests were leading him to a heightened concern with issues of human intelligence. This concern grew out of two disparate factors, one primarily theoretical, the other largely practical. As a result of his own studies of the development and breakdown of cognitive and symbol-using capacities, Gardner became convinced that the Piagetian view of intellect was flawed. Whereas Piaget had

conceptualized all aspects of symbol use as part of a single "semiotic function,"

empirical evidence was accruing that the human mind may be quite modular in design. That is, separate psychological processes appear to be involved in dealing with linguistic, numerical, pictorial, gestural, and other kinds of symbolic systems .

Individuals may be precocious with one form of symbol use, without any necessary carryover to other forms. By the same token, one form of symbol use may become seriously compromised under conditions of brain damage, without correlative depreciation of other symbolic capacities . Indeed, different forms of symbol use appear to be subserved by different portions of the cerebral cortex. On a more practical level, Gardner was disturbed by the nearly exclusive stress in school on two forms of symbol use: linguistic symbolization and logical-mathematical symbolization. Although these two forms are obviously important in a scholastic setting, other varieties of symbol use also figure prominently in human cognitive activity within and especially outside of school. Moreover, the emphasis on linguistic and logical capacities was overwhelming in the construction of items on intelligence,

aptitude, and achievement tests. If different kinds of items were used, or different kinds of assessment instruments devised, a quite different view of the human intellect might issue forth. These and other factors led Gardner to a conceptualization of human intellect that was more capacious. This took into account a wide variety of human cognitive capacities, entailed many kinds of symbol systems, and incorporated as well the skills valued in a variety of cultural and historical settings. Realizing that he was stretching the word

intelligence beyond its customary application in educational psychology, Gardner proposed the existence of a number of relatively autonomous human intelligences. He defined intelligence as the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings, and detailed a set of criteria for what counts as a human intelligence. Gardner's definition and his criteria deviated significantly from established practices in the field of intelligence . Most definitions of intelligence focus on the capacities that are important for success in school.

Problem solving is recognized as a crucial component, but the ability to

fashion a productto write a symphony, execute a painting, stage a play, build up and manage an organization, carry out an experimentis not included, presumably because the aforementioned capacities cannot be probed adequately in short-answer tests.

Moreover, on the canonical account, intelligence is presumed to be a universal, probably innate, capacity, and so the diverse kinds of roles valued in different cultures are not considered germane to a study of "raw intellect."

For the most part, definitions and tests of intelligence are empirically determined.

Investigators search for items that predict who will succeed in school, even as they drop items that fail to predict scholastic success. New tests are determined in part by the degree of correlation with older, already accepted instruments. In sharp contrast, existing psychometric instruments play no role in Gardner's formulation. Rather, a

candidate ability emerges as an intelligence to the extent that it has recurred as an identifiable entity in a number of different lines of study of human cognition. To arrive at his list of intelligences, Gardner and his colleagues examined the literature in several areas: the development of cognitive capacities in normal individuals; the breakdown of cognitive capacities under various kinds of organic pathology; the existence of abilities in "special populations," such as prodigies, autistic individuals, idiots savants, and learning-disabled children; forms of intellect that exist in different species; forms of intellect valued in different cultures; the

evolution of cognition across the millennia; and two forms of psychological evidencethe results of factor-analytic studies of human cognitive capacities and the outcome of studies of transfer and generalization. Candidate capacities that turned up repeatedly in these disparate literatures made up a provisional list of human

intelligences, whereas abilities that appeared only once or twice or were reconfigured differently in diverse sources were abandoned from consideration.

The methods and the results of this massive survey are reported in detail in Frames of Mind and summarized in several other publications. Gardner's provisional list includes seven intelligences, each with its own component processes and subtypes (see supplement 3). It is

claimed that, as a species, human beings have evolved over the millennia to carry out at least these seven forms of thinking. In a biological metaphor, these may be thought of as different

mental "organs" ; in a computational metaphor, these

may be construed as separate information-processing devices . Although

all humans exhibit the range of intelligences, individuals differ--presumably for both hereditary and environmental reasons--in their current profile of intelligences.