Students Classified as LD Who Petitioned for or Fulfilled the College Foreign Language Requirement—Are They Different?

Abstract

This replication study compared 86 petition students who received course substitutions for the college foreign language (FL) requirement with 40 nonpetition students who fulfilled the FL requirement by passing FL courses on cognitive and academic achievement measures and graduating grade point average. The results showed significant differences between the two groups, favoring the nonpetition group on one measure, the American College Testing (ACT) score, when IQ was used as a covariate; however, no significant group differences remained when ACT score was used as a covariate. More than half of the 126 petition and nonpetition students did not meet a minimum criterion for classification as learning disabled (LD), and more than half of both groups (54% and 63%, respectively) were not classified as LD before enrolling in college. Sixty percent of the petition students either had not taken an FL course in college or had achieved only grades of withdrawal before petitioning for substitution of the FL requirement. Implications addressed include petition students' persistence in fulfilling the FL requirement, students' use of instructional accommodations and services, criteria used to classify students as LD, use of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT), and why some students classified as LD pass FL courses and other students classified as LD do not.