A comparison between academic achievement and language aptitude among pre-service language teachers

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to investigate whether there is a correlation between university pre-service language teachers’ language aptitude and their English achievement levels. The sample of the study determined by the stratified sampling method consists of 72 pre-service language teachers who are selected from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year pre-service language teachers at Language Teaching Department. In this study, the data were collected through “Verbal Aptitude Test” modified from the psychometric success site. In this program, the Spearman Correlation Coefficient analysis was used to elicit the correlation of pre-service language teachers’ language aptitude with their English achievement levels. The results indicated that while there is a moderate relation of pre-service language teachers’ English achievement levels with their rote learning ability and grammatical sensitivity there is a weak relation of phonetic coding ability with language aptitude. Additionally, a slight correlation between pre-service language teachers’ inductive learning ability and their achievement levels is found. All in all, even if the dimensions of language aptitude test pointed to some degree of correlation between the components of language aptitude and English achievement level, the overall results of the language aptitude test indicated that there is a weak correlation between pre-service language teachers’ language aptitude and achievement levels. However, the fact that pre-service language teachers have low language aptitude scores does not guarantee they will be less successful in language learning.