One crucial point coming out of this is how teaching reinforces unfavourable images of L2 users. Virtually all the L2 users represented in coursebooks, for example, are either students who are in the process of learning the second language or ignorant foreigners using tourist services. Students never see successful L2 users in action and so have no role model to emulate other than the native speaker, which they will very rarely match. The famous people whose photos proliferate in coursebooks tend to be people who are not known as anything other than monolinguals, such as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones and J.K. Rowling, though a few sportspeople who give interviews in English are sometimes mentioned, such as Martina Hingis (Changes, Richards, 1998). Successful L2 users such as Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, Marie Curie and Samuel Beckett, all taken from François Grosjean’s list of bilinguals (1982: 285), are never mentioned. It cannot do the students any harm to show them that the world is full of successful L2 users; indeed, as de Swaan (2001) argues, they are neces- sary for its functioning. We see later that the goals of language teaching include changing people’s attitudes towards other cultures and using second languages effec- tively. These are hardly advanced by showing students either students like them- selves or people who are unable to use more than one language.
Attitudes 143 0 1 2 3 4 5 British children British adults Belgian children Polish children Strongly disagree Strongly agree
Figure 8.4 Responses to ‘I will always feel more myself in my first language than in another language’ 0 1 2 3 4 5 British children British adults Belgian children Polish children Strongly disagree Strongly agree
Figure 8.5 Responses to ‘People who go to live in a new country should give up their own language’
8.3 Aptitude: are some people better at learning a
second language than others?
● Why do you think some people are good at learning other languages?
● Do you think the same people learn a language well in the classroom as learn it well in a natural setting, or do these demand different qualities?
Focusing questions
aptitude: this usually means the ability to learn the second language in an aca-
demic classroom
Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT): testing phonemic coding, grammat-
ical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability, rote learning
memory-based learners: these rely on their memory rather than grammatical
sensitivity
analytic learners: these rely on grammatical sensitivity rather than memory even learners: these rely on both grammatical sensitivity and memory
Keywords
Everybody knows people who have a knack for learning second languages and others who are rather poor at it. Some immigrants who have been in a country for twenty years are very fluent. Others from the same background and living in the same circumstances for the same amount of time speak the language rather poorly. Given that their ages, motivations, and so on, are the same, why are there such differences? As always, the popular view has to be qualified to some extent. Descriptions of societies where each individual uses several languages daily, such as central Africa or Pakistan, seldom mention people who cannot cope with the demands of a multilingual existence, other than those with academic study problems. Differences in L2 learning ability are apparently only felt in soci- eties where L2 learning is treated as a problem rather than accepted as an every- day fact of life.
So far, the broad term ‘knack’ for learning languages has been used. The more usual term, however, is ‘aptitude’; some people have more aptitude for learning sec- ond languages than others. Aptitude has almost invariably been applied to students in classrooms. It does not refer to the knack that some people have for learning in real-life situations, but to the ability to learn from teaching. In the 1950s and 1960s, considerable effort went into establishing what successful students had in common. The Modern Languages Aptitude Test (MLAT) requires the student to carry out L2 learning on a small scale. It incorporates four main factors that predict a student’s success in the classroom (Carroll, 1981). These are:
● Phonemic coding ability: how well the student can use phonetic script to distin-
● Grammatical sensitivity: whether the student can pick out grammatical func-
tions in the sentence.
● Inductive language learning ability: whether the student can generalize patterns
from one sentence to another.
● Rote learning: whether the student can remember vocabulary lists of foreign
words paired with translations.
Such tests are not neutral about what happens in a classroom, nor about the goals of language teaching. They assume that learning words by heart is an impor- tant part of L2 learning ability, that the spoken language is crucial, and that gram- mar consists of structural patterns. In short, MLAT predicts how well a student will do in a course that is predominantly audio-lingual in methodology rather than in a course taught by other methods. Wesche (1981) divided Canadian stu- dents according to MLAT and other tests into those who were best suited to an ‘analytical’ approach and those who were best suited to an ‘audio-visual’ approach. Half she put in the right type of class, half in the wrong (whether this is acceptable behaviour by a teacher is another question). The students in the right class ‘achieved superior scores’. It is not just aptitude in general that counts, but the right kind of aptitude for the particular learning situation. Predictions about success need to take into account the kind of classroom that is involved, rather than being biased towards one kind or assuming there is a single factor of aptitude which applies regardless of situation.
Krashen (1981a) suggests aptitude is important for ‘formal’ situations such as classrooms, and attitude is important for ‘informal’ real-world situations. While aptitude tests are indeed more or less purpose-designed for classroom learners, this still leaves open the existence of a general knack for learning languages in street settings. Horwitz (1987) anticipated that a test of cognitive level would go with communicative competence, and a test of aptitude with linguistic competence. She found, however, a strong link between the two tests.
Peter Skehan (1986, 1998) developed a slightly different set of factors out of MLAT, namely:
1 Phonemic coding ability. This allows the learner to process input more readily
and thus to get to more complex areas of processing more easily – supposing that phonemes are in fact relevant to processing, a possibility that was queried in Chapter 2.
2 Language analytic ability. This allows the learner to work out the ‘rules’ of the
language and build up the core processes for handling language.
3 Memory. This permits the learner to store and retrieve aspects of language rapidly.
These three factors reflect progressively deeper processing of language and hence may change according to the learner’s stage. While true in an overall sense, they relate loosely to the ideas of processing and memory seen in Chapter 7. It is unclear, for example, which model of memory might fit this scheme and how analytic ability relates to parsing.
The lack of this ‘knack’ is sometimes related to other problems that L2 learners have. Richard Sparks and his colleagues (1989) have observed students whose gen- eral problems with language have gone unnoticed until they did badly on a foreign
language course. They lacked a linguistic coding ability in their first language as well as their second, particularly phonological, and, like dyslexia, apparently unre- lated to their intelligence.
Recent work reviewed by Peter Robinson (2005) has tended to split aptitude into separate components, that is, whether people are better at specific aspects of learn- ing rather than overall learning. A particular sensitivity to language may help with FonF activities, for instance. Second language learning in formal conditions may depend in particular on superior cognitive processing ability. Obviously this sees no relationship between second language acquisition in a classroom and first lan- guage acquisition, since none of these attributes matters to the native child.