Foreign language aptitude
7.10 DOES L2 APTITUDE MATTER UNDER EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT LEARNING CONDITIONS?
An extension of the question of whether aptitude matters across all ages is the problem of whether aptitude matters across all learning conditions, particularly learning with or without intention, attention, awareness and rules, as we discussed
in Chapter 5 (see sections 5.9 through 5.15). During the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen Krashen in the United States and Helmut Zobl in Canada reasoned that aptitude differences would be only relevant when learning with rules, that is, with explicit instruction, because such learning involves conceptually driven processing that depends heavily on overall intelligence and academic abilities. Aptitude would probably not matter in conditions of implicit learning (by which they meant incidental learning, or learning language while doing something else; see section 5.10) because there all humans are endowed with the same universal capacity to implicitly (by which they meant tacitly or intuitively) learn language. Their logic was based on a broadly Chomskyan position of continuous availability of implicit (Universal Grammar based) learning even for adults (see Schwartz, 1998; and our discussions in Chapter 6, sections 6.1 and 6.14).
Robinson (2002) makes a counterproposal, claiming that for adults aptitude will matter equally across all conditions of learning because the same basic cognitive abil- ities are involved in any kind of language learning. This hypothesis stems from the position of SLA researchers who do not commit to a Chomskyan view of language learning and instead posit that language learning is a general cognitive phenome- non, like learning history, mathematical operations, music or cooking (e.g. DeKeyser, 1997; Segalowitz, 2003; see discussion in Chapter 5, sections 5.1 through 5.3). They would predict that individual differences matter across explicit and implicit condi- tions of learning because humans draw from both implicit and explicit general learn- ing processes in order to learn additional languages beyond their mother tongue.
Of course, still under a general cognition theory of L2 learning (rather than a Chomskyan one), it is also reasonable to expect that aptitude will make the most important contribution to success precisely under implicit learning conditions, when people receive no external help and are left to rely on their own devices and strengths (i.e. their differential analytical or memory-driven capacities) to extract, make sense of, retain and structure the relevant information to be learned. In contrast, most learners may benefit from external help via explanations and guided practice, provided these are well designed. Or at least this may be true of literate adult learners who are used to formal language learning anyway. If this third line of reasoning were correct, then it would mean that in fact individual differences across (adult, highly literate) learners emerge more strongly under implicit than under explicit learning conditions.
The empirical evidence regarding this problem is mixed. There is no firm pattern in favour of aptitude mattering more in implicit or explicit conditions consistently. Some studies have shown effects in relation to implicit learning (J. N. Williams, 1999). Of the studies that directly compared an implicit and an explicit condition, some have found that aptitude mattered across the board (de Graaff, 1997), while in others individual differences across learners emerged more strongly under implicit than under explicit learning conditions (Nation and McLaughlin, 1986). Robinson’s research programme in this area has yielded mixed evidence as well, in that comparisons of three or four types of learning conditions have yielded effects for aptitude that are not always consistent with the theoretical predictions he had put forth (for example, Robinson, 1997 versus 2005b).
Most recent developments: multidimensional aptitude 161
Classroom investigations of this issue are rare, but have begun to appear. Rosemary Erlam (2005) examined whether aptitude scores on three different dimensions (analytical ability, phonemic coding and working memory) would correlate with the amount of learning accrued from three different instructional approaches (traditional explicit grammar teaching and practice, collaborative consciousness-raising inductive rule discovery, and explicit explanation plus meaningful comprehension practice only), all focusing on French direct object pronouns and all delivered via three 45-minute lessons. The participants were 14- year-old students of French at a high school in New Zealand, and the aptitude measures were administered retrospectively, six months after the instructional treatments were delivered. She found several significant correlations between analytical ability (measured by the Words in Sentences subtest of the MLAT, see Table 7.1) and working memory and better performance on the written delayed post-tests among the participants who received either the inductive or the comprehension-only practice instructional treatments, but no noteworthy correlations between any of the aptitude measures and the learning exhibited by the participants in the explicit instructional treatment. Erlam interprets this evidence as suggestive of a levelling off of aptitude-treatment interactions for explicit instruction, which seem to benefit learners regardless of their aptitude profiles and strengths. However, Younghee Sheen (2007) obtained a dissimilar pattern of results, when she provided error correction on the English article to learners in six intact classrooms at a community college in the United States, who were asked to read and then retell in writing two stories. She found a stronger relationship between aptitude measures and gains on immediate and delayed post-tests among participants who had received metalinguistic corrections on their article usage in the story than among those who has received similarly explicit corrections but without metalinguistic explanations.
In the end, then, before the interaction between L2 aptitude and learning conditions can be understood, we will need more studies involving comparisons of short- versus long-lasting explicit and implicit treatments. It will be also important to employ different paradigms, triangulating the artificial and semi-artificial language paradigms favoured to date with more classroom studies, such as those by Erlam and Sheen. The latter line of research, in particular, can shed light on the ecological conditions under which aptitude makes different instructional approaches more or less successful or appropriate, thus helping advance knowledge for how to orchestrate successful aptitude-treatment interactions, as we will discuss in section 7.12.