LangSci Lunch Talk: Alia Lancaster (SLA)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

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Relationships among second language proficiency, production, and cognitive aptitude during study abroad

Research has shown that students studying abroad improve on various measures of language proficiency (Freed, 1995). However, individual differences in their cognitive aptitudes may relate to the effectiveness of a study abroad experience. Research in this area is limited and the few studies examining the role of cognitive aptitudes, such as working memory, have shown mixed results. We measured various aptitude and linguistic constructs and examined the relationships among them for English L1 learners of Arabic during a semester-long study abroad in Jordan. Cognitive aptitudes were measured by the High-level Language Aptitude Battery (Hi-LAB), and linguistic constructs were measured by pre and post study abroad Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI), semantic fluency, and more fine-grained oral proficiency measures (e.g., speaking rate).  Analyses for 32 learners revealed that they did make significant gains in OPI scores, and there was positive relationship between working memory (as measured by Running Memory Span) and OPI gains. Analyses for a subset of 25 learners revealed that there were also gains in the more fine-grained oral proficiency measures, and there was a relationship among them,  processing speed, and phonological perception. I will discuss these relationships and what we can learn about the role of cognitive aptitude for study abroad and, more generally, second language acquisition.