Chapter 7

CW7.2 How to do badly at French

Pimsleur et al. (1964) were interested in the problem of why so many people do badly at FL learning. Their estimate was that ‘10 to 20% of all students now studying foreign languages are beset by a frustrating lack of ability in this area’ (p. 115).

Their large-scale study took place in a city in the American mid-West which they referred to by the pseudonym of ‘King City’. They looked at 12 schools in King City – seven junior high schools and five high schools – attended by about 11,500 students. Information was collected in a variety of ways, including by classroom observation, discussions with teachers, and interviews with students, as well as through a number of tests looking at various variables of possible relevance. Motivation was one such variable, and this was measured by two tests, which they called Interest I and Interest II.

There were also two tests which looked at ‘ability with sounds’. Here are their descriptions of these tests (p. 121):

• Chinese Pitch Test: ‘A 30-item test of auditory discrimination in which the student must distinguish Chinese tones.’
• Sound–Symbol Test: ‘A 44-item rapid-fire test in which the student hears a nonsense syllable and must match it with the correct spelling in their booklet; this test measures sound–symbol association.’

The results? Those identified as under-achievers did particularly badly in three tests: Interest I, the Chinese Pitch Test and the Sound–Symbol Test. ‘Such a finding appears to indicate’, Pimsleur et al. concluded, ‘that the so-called “talent for languages” [language aptitude, that is] resides principally in the domain of auditory ability, which may be described as the ability to receive and process information through the ear’ (p. 123).

CW7.3 Some more recent approaches to aptitude

Here are some of the developments described in Dörnyei (2005):

1. CANAL-FT. This stands for the Cognitive Ability for Novelty in Acquisition of Language as applied to Foreign language Test, and it is developed in Grigorenko et al. (2000). The word novelty in this catchy title captures the notion that in FL learning, the ability to handle novelty is important – coming to terms with a world of new sounds, words, constructions and ways of expressing yourself.
   As we saw in MLAT, one of the common ways of finding out about aptitude is to give subjects various ‘psychological tests’. The CANAL-FT uses another common method. Subjects are given tasks involving the learning of items in an artificial (made-up) language. A kind of miniature learning experience. In the case of CANAL-FT, the artificial language is called Ursulu. Why do you think an artificial – as opposed to a natural – language is used?
2. The Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis (Sparks and Ganschow 2001). Again, as we saw with MLAT, some associate knowledge of the L1 with FL aptitude. Sparks and Ganschow’s strong finding is that L1 literacy skills correlate highly with FL learning success. In fact, they find that development of L1 word recognition is the strongest predictor of FL learning. In a word recognition test, subjects are assessed on whether they can accurately read words in a list aloud.
3. According to Miyaki and Friedman (1998, cited in Dörnyei 2005), ‘working memory for language may be one (if not the) central component of this language aptitude’. Working memory (associated with what some called short-term memory) holds and processes information for a short period and is distinguished from long-term memory. It has been used as a reliable predictor for a number of cognitive tasks. Dörnyei describes how Daneman and Carpenter (1980) use working memory in comprehension tests. Their tests involve reading or listening to sentences and doing two things: (1) recalling the final word in each sentence, but also (2) saying whether the sentences are true or false. Try it yourself with the sentences below. It’s not so easy, particularly if the list of sentences is long!
   1. Paris is the capital city of France, a large European country.
   2. The first man to land on the moon was a Russian cosmonaut.
   3. Glaciers are large ‘rivers of ice’ which move slowly, often down the sides of mountains.
   4. William Shakespeare, who lived in the seventeenth century, was a famous English painter.

CW7.4 Problem solving in pairs

Kormos and Dörnyei (2004) studied 44 Hungarian students doing a problem-solving activity in pairs. Several aspects of their language performance were measured, including degree of accuracy, number of words used and the richness of their vocabulary. Several measures related to motivation were also taken, including attitudes towards English classes and degree of self-confidence in using the language. The researchers wanted to find out whether degree of motivation correlated with any aspects of performance.

The finding is that ‘motivation does not only affect the global outcomes of learning processes but also students’ performance in specific language learning tasks’. It was, in fact, more the quantity of language used rather than its ‘quality’ which was affected by motivation. As regards accuracy, it was found that attitudes towards the English course – including to the teacher, the materials being used and the teaching method – had a beneficial effect here. Indeed, a main finding was that attitudes towards the language course could compensate for dislike of a particular learning task.

CW7.5 Attitude towards your own country

What you think of your own country – and not just of the country of the target language speakers – might influence how well you succeed in the FL. One relevant type of attitude is associated with a feeling of ‘ethnocentrism’, a belief in the superiority of your own country (your membership group, as it is sometimes called). You can imagine that this belief will hinder the learning of a foreign language – after all, if you believe your own country to be that important, then it is up to the rest of the world to learn your language, not you theirs. This unhelpful attitude is often said to be held by some countries where English is the main L1. A further fascinating factor is called anomie. This is a feeling of a lack of attachment to your own culture. In some parts of the world, some individuals may yearn to be of a different culture, having a strong desire to be living somewhere else. The effects of anomie on language learning may not be simple. Where the ‘somewhere else’ is a country where people speak the target language, anomie might be a powerful stimulus to learning. For example, someone who dreams all the time of living in America is likely to find the dreams helpful for learning English. But if the reference group is felt in some way to be responsible for the negative feelings of anomie, this may prevent learning. So people living in border areas may develop a dislike for a neighbouring country and its language, perhaps because they perceive of it as a threat to their own country in some way.

Spolsky (1969) researched these two factors, ethnocentrism and anomie, in the United States, but did not in the event find much correlation between them and language learning success. He concludes that attitude towards reference group (the factor we began our discussion with) is more important than attitude towards membership group.

Allwright and Bailey (1991: 157) introduce the cover term receptivity to describe ‘a state of mind … that is open to the experience of becoming a speaker of another language’. The opposite of receptivity is defensiveness. Their discussion of these concepts is very much concerned with attitudes of various sorts.

CW7.6 Finding out what they really think?

One way of finding out people’s true feelings is to use a technique known as the ‘semantic differential’. In this, subjects are asked to indicate feelings towards a group of people (for example) by indicating their impressions on a scale. To illustrate: in one study by Gardner (reported in Stern 1983: 276, after Gardner and Lambert 1972: 157), subjects were asked about ‘French people from France’, and about ‘my French teacher’. Subjects had to put a cross on each line to indicate their impressions. For example, if they felt French people from France were very interesting, they would put a cross as indicated in line 1 below. Here are some of the items that the scale included:

In another study (Lambert et al. 1960), subjects had to listen to a passage read in two languages, French and English. Subjects were then asked to mark their impressions about the speaker (whom they could not see). The scale used was like the one above but included the following fourteen items:

This study was done in Canada, and it revealed some interesting attitudes that French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians hold about themselves and each other.

CW 7.7 Questionnaires and interviews

One of the main advantages of questionnaires is that they allow you to gather a significant amount of information very quickly. If you are interested in students’ attitudes (for example), and want a large number of subjects to be involved in your research, you can gather information very quickly by administering a questionnaire. Another major advantage is that a questionnaire allows you to ask the same questions to all your subjects. The answers you obtain will be comparable and can be measured and interpreted with the help of statistics – another common tool in applied linguistics research. These advantages are considerable, and research based on ‘questionnaires + statistics’ has given us many pieces of valuable information about language learning and teaching.

One potential disadvantage of questionnaires is that they can be inflexible. Often, subjects are not allowed to deviate from the question asked, even when deviations might result in their revealing more insightful information. Using interviews instead allows you to explore unexpected alleyways and also to use follow-up questions to explore a particular issue in depth. But because you may not ask all the same questions to all subjects, the answers you collect may not be as easy to compare to each other, and statistical measurement may be difficult. Also, interviews are very time-consuming to administer, and the researcher often has to rely on information from a very small number of subjects. This information is likely to be rich in detail but restricted in scope because of the small number of informants involved.

If you are involved in doing your own applied linguistic research, remember that whether you use interviews or questionnaires, careful planning is required to obtain useful information. If you do not ask sensible questions, you will not get sensible answers.