Methodology in Language Learning: TAUGHT TOUGH

There is a general agreement that language aptitude does not predict whether an individual can learn a foreign language or not. Rather, except for extremely low aptitude scores, it predicts the rate of progress the individual is likely to make in learning “under optimal conditions of motivation, opportunity to learn, and quality of instruction”. Knowing the individual’s level of ability, we may infer the level of effort and motivation he must expend to learn successfully. A student with a somewhat low aptitude score will need to work harder in an academic language course than a student with a high aptitude test score. If the score is very low, the student may not succeed in any event. Although we normally speak about language aptitude in L2 contexts, it is clear that differences in language comprehension and production begin to emerge early in childhood during the mastery of our mother tongue and then affect performance in reading and writing as children progress through school. It makes intuitive sense that such individual differences in one’s native language skills are related to a learner’s capacity to master a second language and some research findings support this view.

 

Does language aptitude change with age either in a positive or in a negative way? On the one hand, if language aptitude is indeed a trait, it should be relatively stable. A person’s intelligence is a powerful predictor of their performance on the same test even several generations later. The other side of the coin, however, is that age is a central factor in an individual’s language learning capacity—as evidenced by the vast amount of literature on the ‘critical period hypothesis’ addressing age-related changes in SLA—and therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that some of the age-related variation is mediated through aptitude changes that occur over time.

 

[1]One of the most persistent issues in the L2 aptitude literature has been the relationship between language aptitude and general intelligence. This is understandable: If the predictive power of language aptitude is almost entirely due to the commonalities it shares with intelligence, we would need to reconsider the importance attached to the construct, whereas if we find that aptitude exerts its influence above that of intelligence, that would confirm the validity of the concept. Of course, we should realize that the whole issue is somewhat artificial because past research has revealed that both intelligence and language aptitude are composite constructs, subsuming a number of distinct components.

 

In sum, the complex of general intelligence and the complex of language aptitude share definite commonalities but do not coincide completely. The more precisely we identify the various independent components of language aptitude, the more clearly we can establish which cognitive components have direct, indirect, zero, or even negative bearing on one’s language learning capacity.

 

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Bibliography:

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[1] Looking at the intelligence– language aptitude interaction from this perspective does make more sense, because it is indeed an interesting question to decide whether one’s L2 learning capacity is better measured/predicted by a non-language specific intelligence test or by a specially designed instrument focusing on language-related tasks. However, the fact that both intelligence and language aptitude batteries consist of several relatively independent subsections makes even this issue look somewhat arbitrary, because language aptitude tests usually contain certain subsections that are standard parts of intelligence tests as well, the most obvious example being that both the MLAT and the PLAB include an L1 vocabulary test, which is a central component of the measurement of intelligence in general.