Language Testing

Styles of thinking and learning are relevant for understanding foreign- language aptitude and for testing this aptitude. Such styles are preferred modes of thinking, of using one's abilities. This article emphasizes one particular theory of styles, the theory of mental self-government. First, the article describes what styles are. Secondly, it discusses the nature of styles in more detail. Thirdly, it gives some history of the concept of styles. Fourthly, it motivates the theory of mental self-government. Then it describes each of the styles in the theory. Fifthly, it describes measures of styles. Sixthly, it describes data we have collected on styles. Finally, it discusses the relevance of styles for assessing foreign-language aptitude.

Language educators have often suggested that some students may be relatively better at certain types of languages. However, the ways in which target language structures interact with individual differences in language learners has never been seriously investigated. If there are such interactions, we would expect to find certain learning patterns in which our normal expectations for language learning outcomes are reversed. This paper reviews a variety of factors that might lead us to expect such reversals. Psychological and neurological evidence points towards a wide variety of individual differences in language learning mechanisms. Crosslinguistic psy cholinguistic analysis indicates that different target languages offer a wide variety of learning challenges. On the level of orthography, languages with huge inventories of non-Roman characters and symbols offer the greatest challenge. In phonology, all languages require a remapping from L1 struc tures. Lexical learning is most challenging for languages with few cognates to L1. Learners with strong access to the phonological rehearsal loop may be most successful for those languages. In the areas of syntax and morphology, some languages tend to favour learners who establish systematic structural paradigms, whereas other languages may be more easily learned through rote learning processes.

During the 1930s, efforts were made in the USA and elsewhere to develop prognostic tests that would justify decisions to exclude unqualified students from high school foreign language classes. In the USA, after the second world war, USA government language programmes supported research in the assessment of language aptitude to improve selection techniques. While a study by one group of psychologists failed, later work by John B. Carroll and colleagues led to the development of usable language aptitude tests, and contributed to the understanding of the nature of language aptitude.

Standard test theory is machinery for carrying out inference in a particular admixture of ideas from statistics, measurement and psychology that coa lesced in the first third of this century. Recent developments in cognitive and educational psychology, such as increased appreciation of the situated nature of learning and understanding, call for broader ranges of student models and types of data. Just as under the standard testing paradigm, however, we face such questions as: what kinds of evidence are needed to support inferences about students? How much faith can we place in the evidence, and in the statements? Are elements of evidence overlapping, redundant or contra dictory ? When must we ask different questions or pose additional situations to distinguish among competing explanations of what we see? A con ceptualization of test theory is discussed which is meant to address issues of weight and coverage of evidence for statements framed in more recent educational/psychological paradigms. Implications for language assessments built around the ACTFL guidelines are considered.

For some years now I have been wrestling with the question of aptitude from within an information-processing perspective. In this article I will briefly outline the approach I take, examine how aptitude is conceptualized in this framework and discuss one possible component of L2 aptitude: working memory.