Attitudes and Attained Proficiency in ESL: A Sociolinguistic Study of Mexican Americans in the Southwest

Abstract

ficiency. The hypothesis that the observed relationships would be stronger for learners in a second language setting than for learners in a foreign language setting was again sustained. The learners in this study did better on the ESL proficiency test if they saw themselves and Mexicans in general as high on factors that could be interpreted roughly as willingness to receive instruction. They appeared to be anti-integratively motivated towards the Anglo American majority. This was strikingly apparent in the fact that if subjects rated Americans as high on a factor defined principally in terms of positive personal traits they did more poorly on the ESL test. As they became more proficient in ESL they appeared to become more negative toward Americans. This is also consistent with the finding that some traits valued positively if attributed to self or the native language group were valued negatively with reference to Americans. This report concludes a series of four studies of the relationship between attitudes and attained proficiency in a second or foreign language.1 The first report (Oller, Hudson, and Liu, in press) was based on research begun in the fall of 1974. It involved a population of Chinese graduate students in Albuquerque, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Technically, the subjects in that first study were learners in a second language (SL) context as * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Research Colloquium at the 1976 TESOL Convention in New York City. The authors wish to express their thanks to Alan Hudson, Wallace Lambert, and Robert Gardner for providing them with some of the manuscript material cited in the text. Mr. Oiler, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Educational Foundations, University of New Mexico, has been on a visiting appointment at Southern Illinois University this yast year. He has written widely on language testing, psycholinguistics, and pragmatics and is co-editor (with Jack C. Richards) of Focus on the Learner (Newbury House, 1973). Ms. Baca, Graduate Assistant, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, is currently researching the role of Spanish in New Mexico. Mr. Vigil is an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico. This distinction was first called to our attention by Richard Van der Mortel at UCLA. Its usefulness in this connection was discussed by a group of students which included Stephen Krashen and Marianne Celce-Murcia among others. They reasoned that the relationship between attitudes and attainment of proficiency in a target language might be very different in a second language context than in a foreign language context.