Development
John B. Carroll and Stanley Sapon are mainly responsible for the development of the MLAT. They designed the test as part of a five-year research study at Harvard University between 1953 and 1958. The initial purpose of developing the Modern Language Aptitude Test was to help the US Army find and train people who would learn foreign languages with ease.
After field testing many different kinds of verbal tasks, Carroll chose five tests that he felt worked well as a combination in predicting foreign language learning success in a variety of contexts. These tests were minimally correlated with one another, but used together they had demonstrated high predictive validity with respect to such criteria as language proficiency ratings and grades in foreign language classes.
The design of the MLAT also reflects a major conclusion of Carroll's research, which was that language learning aptitude was not a "general" unitary ability, but rather a composite of at least four relatively independent "specialized" abilities. The four aspects, or "components," of language learning aptitude that Carroll identified were phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, rote learning ability and inductive language learning ability. In the article “The prediction of success in intensive foreign language training,” Carroll defined these components as follows:
| Ability | Definition |
|---|---|
| Phonetic coding ability | an ability to identify distinct sounds, to form associations between those sounds and symbols representing them, and to retain these associations; |
| Grammatical sensitivity | the ability to recognize the grammatical functions of words (or other linguistic entities) in sentence structures; |
| Rote learning ability for foreign language materials | the ability to learn associations between sounds and meanings rapidly and efficiently, and to retain these associations; and |
| Inductive language learning ability | the ability to infer or induce the rules governing a set of language materials, given samples of language materials that permit such inferences. |
The data used to calculate the statistical norms for the MLAT were collected in the fall of 1958. The MLAT was administered to approximately nineteen hundred students in grades nine to twelve and thirteen hundred students from ten colleges and universities. For adult norms, the MLAT was administered to about one thousand military and governmental enlisted persons and personnel. The test was given to the subjects before starting a language course or intensive training program. Their performance in the language program was later compared to their score on the MLAT to calculate the predictive validity of the test.
Read more about this topic: Modern Language Aptitude Test
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