Question:
I recently posted an inquiry on this list about attitudes and
language learning that yielded one interesting response which I pursued,
suggesting the Kelley and Meyers Cross-Cultural Adaptability Inventory.
I would like to query the list again, slightly more specifically,
in hopes of getting additional responses:
I am interested in examining a possible relationship between a
person's attitude toward different languages and cultures and that person's
likelihood of success in learning a foreign language. Can anyone suggest
any instrument to measure such factors?
Answer:
categorizing the world of learners into those who are
instrinsically/extrinsically motivated or who
have an integrative or instrumental orientation. I happen to be both a
director of an English Language Institute and a Professor of Linguistics
so I have the unusual opportunity to see learners from the initial stages
of their language learning (ESL) to their taking roles as undergraduate
or graduate students in my linguistics classes. I think we all know
students who appear to be highly motivated and yet can't seem to overcome
obstacles and become stuck at some level of acquisition while others,
with apparently the same social-cultural-ethnic-L1-educational
backgrounds breeze through and become proficient language users and full
participants in academic life and later in careers in an English speaking
society. Some of our students even have aspirations (and realize them)
to become teachers of English.
This semester, for example, I have a large undergraduate linguistics
class comprised of native speakers and speakers of several different
first languages. This is a course in second language acquisition and
teaching. I have about a half dozen native speakers of Polish and another
approximately half-dozen speakers of Korean among the 35 students. What
is interesting is that the Polish speakers have the same amount of
language training (both EFL and ESL) as the Korean speakers yet the
Korean speakers are much more heavily fossilized both in speaking and
writing. While this is anecdotal, it suggests that there are strong
group factors which affect final outcomes of the language learning
process and that while there is a tremendous amount of variation among
individuals within groups, there is still a certain amount of determinism
from group factors such as those pointed about John Schumann years ago in
his social distance theory.
In other words, while we play games with UG/not-UG, instruction/
natural approach, grammar/no grammar, it is these over-riding social
factors at micro-individual, macro-group, long-term and short-term that
seem to decide much of the language profile of bilinguals who show up in
my classes in increasing numbers. I agree with Peter that the
Lambert-Gardiner constructs were the product of the Canadian experience
but it would also appear to be too bad that we have pushed these
motivational and attitudinal variables to the back burner and have become
more concerned with micro-linguistic factors such as which parameters
have to be reset, who has access to UG and who does not, etc. We may be
missing the forest for the trees (literally).
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