Diagnosing Barriers In Foreign Language Acquisition

Abstract

University students of non-linguistic specialties in Russia often have poor levels of foreign language (usually English) proficiency. According to the study of E.A. Kogan just 5-15% of university students have intermediate and upper intermediate levels in English proficiency. Most of the students demonstrate only breakthrough and waystage levels. The problem of low academical success (in spite of student’s willingness to learn the language) in foreign language teaching practices and scientific literature is known under different names: underachievement in foreign languages, bad language learners, foreign language learning disability, as well as social-psychological barrier, barrier in foreign language teaching, barrier in trained actions. In our research we suggested the term ‘foreign language acquisition (FLA) barrier’ which we see as student’s individual reflection of objective difficulties (social adaptation, psychological, psychophysiological, didactic, competence, and linguistic) influencing the learning process. The present article introduces a test (web-based questionnaire “Diagnosing barriers in FLA”) evaluating students’ subjective attitude towards FLA difficulties – that is the level of FLA barriers. The questionnaire can be used for Russian speaking students over 15 years old, learning English in a group outside the language environment. The test was successfully validated: it was completed by 100 university students of non-linguistic specialties; the correlation between the test and criterion (effectiveness of foreign language learning) is 0.81.