Implicit language attitudes: findings from the experimental

The large-scale attitudinal study revealed that students commonly express positive affective and integrative attitudes towards Luxembourgish and positive instrumental attitudes towards French. In order to gain further insights into the complex nature of students’ language attitudes towards Luxembourgish and French an experimental Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald et al., 1998) was devised and carried out with a small sample of students. Through a series of categorisation tasks, this method measures informants’ automatic associations between different categories (e.g. different languages) and positive or negative attributes (3.4.3). In the IAT, the direct investigation of students’ explicit language attitudes in the large-scale questionnaire study was complemented by indirectly accessing a small sample of students’ attitudes towards Luxembourgish and French. Explicit attitudes, commonly accessed through questionnaires or interviews, can be biased towards socially desirable attitudes and therefore may not reflect a speaker’s real language attitudes (Garrett, 2007: 117). By avoiding the requirement that informants report their attitudes in a direct manner, the IAT

languages, with positive or negative attributes and may therefore reveal attitudes that informants are not willing to express directly in questionnaires (Greenwald et al., 1998: 1465). Further details regarding the design of the IAT can be found in section 3.4.3.

As previously outlined (3.4.3), the IAT is composed of a sequence of seven categorisation tasks (i.e. blocks) to be completed by the informant on a computer.

Various practice blocks are included in the experiment in order to allow informants to familiarise themselves with the task at hand. The IAT scores which provide insights into implicit attitudes emerge from the two combined categorisation tasks performed in blocks 4 and 7. In block 4, informants are required to categorise as fast as possible ‘Luxembourgish’ with ‘positive’

attributes and ‘French’ with ‘negative’ attributes. In block 7, the task is reversed and informants are required to categorise ‘Luxembourgish’ with ‘negative’

attributes and ‘French’ with ‘positive’ attributes. By calculating the difference of the informants’ mean reaction times to the two test blocks (4 and 7) implicit attitudinal differences can be revealed (Borton et al., 2007: 789). Greenwald et al.

(1998: 1466) argue that ‘if the target categories are differentially associated with the attribute dimension, the subject should find one of the combined tasks […] to be considerably easier than the other’. The difference in ease or difficulty results in different reaction times and reveals an implicit attitudinal difference between target categories. In other words, if an informant reacts faster when having to press one key for ‘Luxembourgish’ and ‘positive’ (Block 4) than for ‘French’ and

‘positive’ (Block 7), the researcher can assume that the informant holds a more positive implicit attitude towards Luxembourgish than towards French.

For the purposes of this study, five students completed an IAT which required them to associate two languages, Luxembourgish and French, with positive and negative attributes. Mean reaction times to the two test blocks (blocks 4 and 7) showed that participants held more positive implicit attitudes towards Luxembourgish than towards French; that is, they reacted faster when required to

press one key for ‘Luxembourgish’ and ‘positive’ (mean reaction time = 679 msec) than for ‘French’ and ‘positive’ (mean reaction time = 819 msec). The mean difference between the Luxembourgish–positive and French–positive trials amounts to 140 msec. This difference in reaction times is consistent with Borton et al.’s (2007: 795) IAT study of self-esteem which found that participants held more positive implicit attitudes towards themselves than towards others. In this case the attitudinal difference was revealed by a mean reaction time difference of 154 msec between the self-positive and other-positive trials. The mean difference was statistically significant from zero by a one-sample t test [t(77) = 8.16, p<.001]. Due to the small sample size of the small-scale language attitude IAT reported above, tests for statistical significance could not be undertaken but would be appropriate with a larger sample size.

Despite the enormous interest the IAT has received from both the scientific community and the general public (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001: 774), the exact meaning of IAT results remains open for discussion among social psychologists.

Karpinski and Hilton (2001) draw attention to the often low or non-existent correlations between IAT findings and explicit measurements of attitudes. They demonstrate this lack of strong correlations in a series of experiments and support an ‘environmental association interpretation’ of the IAT. According to the environmental association model, the IAT gains insights into the associations a person has experienced in their environment without being able to throw light onto an individual’s level of endorsement towards a given attitude object (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001: 775). When following this line of thought, the findings from the language attitude IAT reported above do not necessarily reflect the informants’ positive implicit attitudes towards Luxembourgish but reveal that the informants have more often experienced Luxembourgish in association with positive attributes and French in association with negative attributes than vice versa. Karpinski and Hilton (2001: 787) conclude that the IAT does not necessarily measure attitudes on a different level but can successfully reveal the

disagreements concerning the exact meaning of IAT findings highlight that explicit measurement of language attitudes cannot simply be replaced by psychological experiments such as the IAT. However, the IAT generates invaluable information concerning the positive and negative associations people have experienced in relation to different languages and, therefore, contributes to a more holistic understanding of the role of socio-psychological factors in the production and perception of language when used in combination with explicit measurements of attitudes.

The findings from the language attitude IAT carried out for the purposes of this study indicate that students associate Luxembourgish with more positive attributes than French. Due to the small sample size no correlation tests with their explicit language attitudes (i.e. questionnaire responses) were carried out.

However, their positive implicit attitudes towards Luxembourgish are in line with the widely reported positive affective and integrative attitudes towards Luxembourgish in the questionnaire study. Moreover, the high demand for the use of Luxembourgish as a medium of instruction as well as the frequent choice of Luxembourgish for the completion of the questionnaire are also reflected in the findings from the IAT.

4.5 Conclusion

The various analyses presented in this chapter draw attention to the complex nature of language attitudes prevalent in Luxembourg. While students largely express positive affective and integrative attitudes towards Luxembourgish, they establish French as the most useful language in Luxembourg. In addition, largely mixed attitudes towards the importance of learning Luxembourgish and the use of foreign languages in education contrast with a widespread desire for the official recognition of Luxembourgish as a medium of instruction. These findings must be viewed in connection with the results emerging from the IAT which indicate that Luxembourgish is implicitly associated with more positive attributes than French.

The highly varied results of the attitudinal study presented in this chapter may therefore suggest that while students currently may not regard Luxembourgish as a useful language in Luxembourg, they show a desire for Luxembourgish to fulfil a more instrumental function in the future. This interpretation of the data does not solely rest on students’ language of instruction preferences and on their frequent choice of Luxembourgish for the completion of the questionnaire but also on their extensive self-reported use of Luxembourgish in classroom activities. Further insights into the ways in which students’ language attitudes are manifested in daily classroom interactions require an investigation of language use in context and will constitute the focus of chapters 5 and 6.