DOCUMENT RESUME TM 000 901 ED 057 071 Carroll, John B. AUTHOR Test Research and Implications of Aptitude TITLE for Foreign Language Psycholinguistic Theory Teaching. Service, Princeton, N.J. Educational Testing INSTITUTION RM-71-14 REPORT NO Oct 71 PUB DATE International at XVIIth 15p.; Paper presented NOTE Applied Irternational Association of Congress, Belgium, July 27, 1971 Psychology, Liege, MF-$0.65 HC-$3.29 EDRS PRICE *Individual *Educational Research; *Aptitude Tests; DESCRIPTORS Instruction; Differences; *Language Grammar; Teaching *Psycholinguistics; Structural Techniques ABSTRACT the' language aptitude and The nature of foreign discussed. Areas include implications for teaching are consequent individual difficulties, skills, diagnosis of teaching of aptitudinal entities, "audiolingual sounds as unique necessity of identifying and theory," and inductive "cognitive code learning habit theory" vs. techniques. (MS) deductive teaching RM-71 -14 SEARCH R MEMORANDUM Li PSYCHOLINGUISTIC THEORY IMPLICATIONS OF APTITUDE TEST RESEARCH AND TEAT-CHING FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE John B. Carroll OF HEALTH M.S. DEPARTMENT EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCAPON BEEN REPRO- THIS DOCUMENT HAS RECEIVED FROM DUCED EXACTLY AS ORGANIZATION ORIG- THE PERSON OR VIEW OR CIN- INATING IT. POINTS OF RECESS' RILY IONS STATED DO NOT DU 01 REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE CATION POSITION OR POLICY. "Achievements and Paper presented at Colloquium 15, psycholinguistics to prospects in the application of languages," XVIIth International the teaching of foreign tam' Applied Psychology, Congress, International Association of (=> Lf6ge, July 27, 1971. C) Educational Testing Service Princeton, New Jersey October 1971 1 THEORY IMPLICATIONS OF APTITUDE TEST RESEARCH AND PSYCHOLINGUISTIC FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING John B. Carroll Educational Testing Service there was considerable skdpticism that foreign Twenty years ago to be of language aptitude could be measured with sufficient precision Advances in psychometrics and in our.understanding of practical use. possible the the nature of language and of language learning have made development and wide application of several tests of foreign language English and aptitude --the Modern Language Aptitude Test in its various Sapon, 1959, 1967; Correll &. & foreign language versions (Carroll Aptitude Ingenkamp, 1967; Ferencich, 1964), and the Pimsleur Language Battery (1966). language The knowledge we now have about the components of foreign' research can, aptitude that have been iaentified in the course of this language I believe, lead to new insights into problems of foreign wish to learning and teaching, and it is to this possibility that I address myself here. aptitude First, let me recount a few facts about foreign language attempting In the main, the work has been concerned with and its testing. school, university, to predict the rate at which persons at the secondary foreign language, but and adult levels would successfully master a elementary school children useful tests of foreign language aptitude for Research suggests that have been devised in both English and German. 2 --2- universal and individual differences in foreign Ian:glace aptitude are that aptitude highly generalized in two senses: first, in the sense the individual might is equally relevant to any foreign language that individual differences choose to study, and second, in the sense that equally among the native speakers in foreign language aptitude are found tests Language aptitude can be measured by of different languages. Depending sometimes less. that can be administered in about an hour or the conditions of partly on how a foreign language is taught and between measures of learning, there are often striking relationships In some of language learning. aptitude and of achievement in foreign multiple correlations as high as .84; my own work I have obtained nearly as high as this in Pimsleur has obtained validity coefficients apparently types of On the oti.,-2 hand, there are some of his studies. in which the validity coefficients foreign langu-8e teaching situations not significantly different from zero. are much lower; sometimes they are (Carroll, 1962) to account for this I have tried to develop a theory attempts to take into account the variation in validity--a theory that uaLiLy o.L opportunit-r 4 role of such variables as motivation, in addition to specific instruction, and general verbal intelligence, model I have suggested, in fact, that a foreign language aptitudes. of school learning," can be applied such as this, which I call "a model besides foreign language to instruction in many other subjects that if aptitude is In brief, the theory suggests (Carroll, 1963). to learn something under reflected in how much time an individual needs opportunity to learn, and quality optimal conditLons of motivation, aptitude can be either increased or of instruction, the role of But it would be a varied. decreased when these other conditions are -3- digression from the major theme of this paper to discuss the details of this model. It has been puzzling to me that there has been little recognition of the implications of foreign language aptitude research in current According to these theories, theories of native language acquisition. (1967), the ability to acquire as propounded for example by Lenneberg one's first language is largely innate, but exists only during a of certain critical period, say during the first six or seven years the age life, after which it declines almost to a vanishing point by respects To be sure, learning a second language is in many of puberty. these quite different from learning one's mother tongue, but certainly Fbr example, both kinds of learnings have some common properties. acquire require the capacity to remember and reproduce sounds and to I believe it is reasonable to propose and apply grammatical rules. acquisition that would apply to a somewhat modified theory of language e th( both native and second languages, namely th wl individual "critical period" in the early years of life, during which the (be it native or f=eign), has a heightened capacity to learn any language to which this capacft: there are indix-idual differences in the degree in effect, di-Terences declines, and that these individual differences are, Persons with high foreign language in foreign language aptitude. for same reason 10.5-, aptitude at puberty or beyond are those who have which they are nattvely little of the language acquisition ability with thosir endowed, whereas those with poor foreign language aptitude are I would empalasize that this who have last most of this innate ability. be able to confirm until is only a speculation, one that we may not Parenthetically, appropriate longitudinal studies are performed. : 41 should also remark that although I can accept the notion of innate language acquisition ability or abilities, I do not subscribe to the strong form of this theory which claims that a "language acquisition form taken device" is specially adapted for learning the particular (1971). by human language, as suggested by McNeill aptitude. Let us look more Closely at the nature of foreign language consists of Correlational and factor-analytic studies suggest that it Those that 1958). several relatively independent abilities (Carroll, ability, grammatical have been most clearly identified are phonetic coding sensitivity, and inductive ability. and store in Phonetic coding ability is the ability to identify, For example, sounds. long-term memory, new language sounds or strings of auditory nonsensr if a person is presented with a string of two or three such as mental syllables and then made to do a distracting task to repeat the nonsense arithmetic for ten seconds, after which he is asked in learning foreign syllables, his ability to do so is related to his success of this A somwhat more indirect, but more practical measure languages. learn the phonetic ability is a test in which the individual has to his own language or transcriptions for a series of phonemes, either phonemes,in between heard sounds and in a foreign language, by noticing the correspondences depends on Apparently, success in this learning task the printed symbols. It seems obvious that of the sounds. success ir. remembering the identities of a foreign language, phonetic coding ability is demanded.in the learning identities of the new phonemes because the individual must not only learn the remember the phonetic of that language, but must also recognize and words, and Antonation contours of sequences represented by the morphemes, 5 that language. -5-- ability Grammatical sensitivity may be defined as the individual's sentences to demonstrate his awareness of the syntactical patterning of individual elements in a language and of the grammatical functions of Although it is often said that linguistic "competence," in a sentence. (1965), involves some kind of "knowledge" in the sense defined by Chomsky "knowledge" is ordinarily of the grammatical rules of a language, this (In fact, I shall suggest, later in this out of conscious awareness. better regarded as a system of habits, paper, that this "knowledge" is A person who is "competent" it.) contrary to Chomsky's interpretation of grammatical sentences in a language is able to create and understand new 1 much less without being aware of the "rules" underlying such sentences, Nevertheless, some adolescents and being able to formulate those rules. demonstrate an awareness adults (and even some children) can be made to The most direct of the syntactical structure of the sentences they speak. pairs of test of this ability consists of a series of items in which In each pair, a particular word sentences are presented to the subjects. the first sentence, and the subject or plu'ase is singled out for attuntion in sentence which has an analogous has to find a word or phrase in the second Even among adults, there are large individual differences grammatical flInction. related to success in this abY..ity, and these individual differences are ability is called in learning foreign languages, apparently because this grammatical rules and apply them in upon when the student tries to learn constructing or comprehending new sentences in that language. is inductive A third major component of foreign language aptitude of inductive It is not yet certain whether this is the same kind ability. so-called Inductive ability that is measured by factor-analytic tests of the It is probably Reasoning factor, but I am inclined to-'believe that it is. A -6- most closelvasscciated through thjs factor that foreign language aptitude is apparently, much less with general intelligence (the other factors being, In the case of language learning, inductive correlated with intelligence). (in either auditory or ability is the ability to examine language material patterns of correspondences printed form) and from this to notice and identiry A typical grammatical form. and relationships involving either meaning or in an artificial method of measuring this ability is to present materials the grammatical and language in such a way that the individual can induce Such an ability might well be semantic rules governing that language. because even called upon in the learning of an actual foreign language, presentation of rules, in a form of teaching that emphasizes the formal of the rules for himself. the learner must inevitably work out the application the teaching of foreign What implications do these findings have for languages? to which the One view of aptitude is that it represents the degree to a learning task-- individual has mastered the skills that are requisite terminology employed by i.e., the "entering behaviors" for the task, in the If this view is correct, it behavioristically-oriented psychologists. improve learning should be possible to improve aptitude, and indirectly, tested by aptitude efficiency, by giving specific training in the skills of this possibility To my knowledge, the only important study measures. Weiss of Stanford University has been conducted by'Robert Politzer and Louis Unfortunately, I am unable to agree entirely & Weiss, 1969). (Politzer investigators, because of with the limited conclusions reached by these One of their designs. what I consider to be flaws in their research made to give findings, however, was quite clear: when an attempt was e aptitude skills in conjunction specific training in certain languag -7-- resented by with regular language courses, this training tended to be and usefulness the students involved, who could not perceive its relevance But as I would interpret their results, this in foreign language learning. pf training training (as opposed to no training, or to a "placebo" type effect either involving cultural enrichment studies) had no -ignificant in foreign in improving language aptitude or in accelerating progress experimental The gains in aptitude that did occur in both language learning. to the effects of the and control groups were attributed by the authors could have been regular language training, but at least part of these gains There was some evidence that due to practice and mai-,uration effects. foreign language training, aptitude training conducted outside the context of improvement in viz., in "study skills" classes, could produce some flawed by the fact g-nammatical sensitivity, but this result is possibly skills classes was, that the mean initial alltitude level of the study the language training classes. apparently, considerably lower than that of Politzer-Weiss study is that About all that can be said as a result of the foreign language aptitude the design and possible usefulness of training in skjlls needs much further investigation. the teaching There are some general grounds for pessimism regarding It is the usual finding that training tends to of aptitudinal skills. differences (Anastasi, 1958) increase rather than decrease individual performance are improved on the average. even when absolute levels of native endowments in language If foreign language aptitude is linked to earlier, it may be difficult acquisition ability in the way I have suggested And even if native endowment. for training to override the effects of this effect may be quite specific training can improve measured aptitude, transfer to the language learning to the measures employed and'. may not task itself. prospects The papers at this colloquium are to be addressed to future this spirit I wish to more than to the consideration of past work, and in likely to have propose that the findings of aptitude research are more suggesting implications for foreign language teaching if they are viewed as language training strategies of learning and teaching within the context of skills. rather than suggesting techniques of training prerequisite of At one level of application, aptitude measures provide means From the learners. diagnosing the patterns of difficulties exhibited by rot highly fact that the components of foreign language aptitude are from student to correlated, it follows that these patterns will vary student, the With a knowledge of the profile of the individual student. individualize instruction by directing teacher may be in a better position to special ei-rmtion to the learner's difficulties. techniques of tea:l.hing At a higher level of application, specific that may be useful for all students are suggested. coding ability implies The fact of individual differences in phonetic of discriminating sounds, that the student's problem is not so much one language teachers, as it is one of identifying as commonly believed among Discrimination of in memory. sounds as unique entities and storing them in a sense incidental to the sounds is necessary, of course, but it is The distinction I am making between identification and storage processes. to that between relative discrimination and identification is analogous The student special case of this. and absolute judgment; in fact it is a produce particular sounds, noti must therefore be taught to identify and Identification may be merely to notice differences between sounds. "tag"--a particular phonetic facilitated by giving each sound its own
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