Every year, approximately 250,000 16-year-olds take GCSEs in modern foreign languages in England. Policy-makers, test-developers, and educators require a strong research-informed understanding of language proficiency, its components, and—critically—its relations with affective factors, such as motivation and attitudes towards language learning. Some such evidence exists. However, most research has focused on learners of English in universities, with few studies with languages other than English in compulsory education.
Our study aimed to address these gaps by investigating relations between (a) language proficiency and its components and (b) achievement and attitudes towards language learning, among GCSE learners of French and Spanish who only have 400-450 hours of instruction before sitting their GCSEs.
In the summer of 2022 and 2023, participants completed a series of tasks assessing (a) proficiency in listening, reading, writing, and speaking, (b) different types of knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and sound–spelling correspondences, and (c) affective factors, such as motivation and attitudes towards language learning.
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This task involved participants listening to a set of bisyllabic real (French: k = 25) and pseudo (k = 25) words, each presented individually and in isolation. After listening to each word, participants had to complete its spelling by typing in the missing sound–symbol correspondence..
Gorilla Open Materials Attribution-NonCommerical Research-Only
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Participants were presented with a set of bisyllabic real (k = 25) and pseudo-words (k = 25). Each word was presented individually and in isolation and participants had to read each word aloud.
Gorilla Open Materials Attribution-NonCommerical Research-Only
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Participants read each sentence and had to determine whether it was ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, with no time constraints imposed. (An ‘I don’t know’ option was included to reduce guessing behaviour.) Prior to the main items, two practice sentences (one grammatical and one ungrammatical) were provided.
Gorilla Open Materials Attribution-NonCommerical Research-Only
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The stimuli were identical to those in the grammaticality judgment task, but instead participants heard each sentence and were recorded (audio-recorded by a (female) L1 speaker) and then had to repeat what they had heard.
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The lexical decision was a speeded Yes–No test and included 60 written target (real) words (including the 50 critical items) and 60 written pseudowords as distractors. Participants saw each word one at a time in the centre of the screen and had to press the left arrow if they thought the word was real and the right arrow if they thought the word was fake.
Gorilla Open Materials Attribution-NonCommerical Research-Only
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