STUDENTS’ SPEAKING PERFORMANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF LANGUAGE LEARNING APTITUDE

The language learning aptitude research has become popular again lately after some redefining efforts to include creative and practical language-acquisition abilities. Therefore, this study is designed by involving students’ creativity and part of language acquisition (i. e. speaking performance). Recent works have shown that the discussion on aptitude is very much alive after a relatively silent period of about thirty years. Early studies have shown that the established language learning aptitude tests show high correlations with intelligence and controlled language production, but low correlations with free oral production and general communication skills. The conventional aptitude tests do not tell the whole story of a person’s second-language learning ability. To challenge the old findings, in this research, the students’ language learning aptitude which is measured by an aptitude test is correlated with their speaking performance. It is an extending work to be up-to-date with the present trend of English teaching-learning in classroom which plays an important role in second-language acquisition as well, i. e. free oral production and general communication skills. A well-established test format and instruments by expert involving some relevant elements has been adapted for the selected students and the feasibility of assessing speaking performance in an English course is evaluated empirically. The results showed that the test and the instrument provide a reliable and efficient method of assessing the students’ aptitude and speaking performance. Evidence of validity was obtained from various tasks, and from an analysis of the scores in terms of some aspects, which is known to be associated with different levels of aptitude and speaking performance.


INTRODUCTION Language Learning Aptitude Research
At the early studies of language learning aptitude, a number of tests have been developed to assess language aptitude. Much of the early work on aptitude focused on developing tests to measure it (Ellis, 1994). The most frequently quoted aptitude tests are the Modern language Aptitude Test (MLAT) by Carroll & Sapon (2002) and the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (PLAB), develop by (Pimsleur et al., 2004). Both tests have shown high correlations with proficiency scores in schools. However, the tests are completely geared towards formal second-language learning and particularly towards the way in which languages were taught in the classroom of the 1960s. These tests contain a wide range of tasks. For example, phonemic coding ability is tested by sound-symbol association tests in which the learner has to make a link between a sound and a symbol. Grammatical sensitivity is tested by recognizing the function that a word fulfills in a sentence. The tests largely overlap, but Pimsleur et al. (2004) includes intelligence as one aspect of aptitude, whereas Carroll & Sapon (2002) claims that intelligence must be seen as distinct from aptitude.
Not until the early 1990s did research on language aptitude comes into vogue again. Second, the tests need to be revised to more strongly reflect the kind of abilities involved in basic interpersonal communication skills. Third, research needs to be conducted in a variety of learning contexts including informal ones. Recent approaches take into account that aptitude has shown to be a good predictor of achievement in classroom second-language learning.
Language aptitude can also emphasize its information-processing side and consider the different components separately rather than as a fixed combination of factors.

(Speaking) Performance Research
At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a great deal of interest in the USA in recording Indian languages, as much 'empirical evidence' as possible needed to be collected for analysis. Even some experts published their books containing their study of this issue such as Skinner (1957) in his book entitled Verbal Behavior which are supported by recent research.
It has been demonstrated that the processes involved in producing language can be quite different than those involved in comprehending language. Van Dijk & Kintsch (1983) have shown with native speakers that comprehension will sometimes rely on comprehension strategies rather than on a closed, logical system of rules required to produce a grammatical utterance. Swain (1995) who are similar to Krashen (1982) has pointed out that 'In many cases, we do not utilize syntax in understanding -we often get the message with a combination of vocabulary, or lexical information plus extralinguistic information'. Comprehension -at least all but the most advanced levelsallows many linguistic signals to be ignored: redundant grammatical and semantic functions such as concord, definite/ indefinite distinctions, singular/ plural distinctions, singular/ plural distinctions, etc., can very often be ignored without seriously distorting the message being comprehended.
De Bot, K., Lowie, W. and Verspoor (2005) state in their book that research is beginning to accumulate evidence supporting the theoretical claim that 'pushing' learners beyond their current performance level can lead to enhanced performance, a step which may represent the internalization of new linguistic knowledge, or the consolidation of existing knowledge.

Language Learning Aptitude
Regardless of all other factors like age and motivation, some people happen to be better at learning a second language than others. In the literature about second-language learning, a person's inherent capability of second-language learning is labeled language learning aptitude. Language learning aptitude is one of the general factors that characterize individual learner differences. And according to Stern (1994), language learning aptitude is one of the factors among learner characteristics which is frequently presented in the literature. Traditionally, the concept of an aptitude for languages is derived from everyday experience that some language learners appear to have a 'gift for languages' which others lack.
Aptitude can be seen as a characteristic that is similar to intelligence, which cannot be altered through training. However, John Bissell Carroll doesn't follow the traditional view of aptitude which said that it is as a characteristic that correlates with a student's achievement (the high aptitude one has, the better he or she is likely to learn). Carroll comes up with his own idea. He views aptitude as the amount of time takes someone to learn any given material, rather than his or her capacity to master it. In Carroll's view, students with very low aptitude with respect to a particular kind of learning simply take a much longer time to reach mastery than students with a higher aptitude.
This view is optimistic in the sense that it suggests that it is possible for nearly all students to master any given set of objectives, if sufficient time (the opportunity to learn) is provided along with appropriate materials and instruction.
As different skills are involved in language learning, aptitude needs to include several factors. In the literature, aptitude is usually described as a combination of four factors: • The ability to identify and remember sounds of the foreign language; • The ability to recognize how words function grammatically in sentences; • The ability to induce grammatical rules from language examples; and • The ability to recognize and remember words and phrases.

(Speaking) Performance
Chomsky is the expert who introduces the term 'performance' which is similar to the Saussurian notion of 'parole'. Performance refers to the infinitely varied individual acts of verbal behavior with their irregularities, inconsistencies, and errors. It was Ferdinand de Saussure, an early-twentieth-century Swiss linguist who is the pioneer, made a useful distinction between 'parole' (the raw linguistic data) and 'langue' (the underlying, more theoretical system).
Influenced by the writings of Ivan Pavlov, a nineteenth-century Russian scientist, John Watson, and Edward Thorndike (both early twentieth-century American scientist), Skinner (1957) published a famous book called Verbal Behavior in 1957 adopted a strictly behavioristic point of view and argued that the only observable object of scientific study is the verbal behavior, the speech utterances and texts. In the behaviorist tradition, learning is seen as the product of teaching: conditioning and habit formation. The most famous example of 'conditioning' is the Pavlov dog experiment. Because dogs had been taught to associate a bell with food, dogs were 'conditioned' to salivate when hearing the bell. Learning was thus seen as making a series of connections, called stimulus-response bonds. When more complex learning was involved, the teaching was done in smaller successive separate steps, referred to as 'shaping'. Learning in general, but also learning of a language, was thus seen as pure habit formation.
It is a debatable issue in linguistics whether to lay emphasis mainly or exclusively on competence or equally on performance, or perhaps on the relationship between the two. In language teaching theory, too, the question of language system versus use goes to the heart of the debate on teaching methods where the distinction between a 'formal' treatment of the language as an abstract system and a 'functional' or communicative treatment of the language in use is a crucial issue. However, such performance-based assessment as oral production, written production, open-ended responses, integrated performance (across skill areas), group performance, and other interactive tasks are time-consuming and therefore expensive, but those extra efforts are paying off in the form of more testing because students are assessed as they perform actual or simulated real-world tasks.
When teaching practice changed to include practice in actual communication, aptitude testing went out of fashion. Several studies have shown that MLAT and PLAB show high correlations with intelligence and controlled language production, but low correlations with free oral production and general communication skills. As the latter do play an important role in second-language acquisition as well, the conventional aptitude tests do not tell the whole story of a person's second-language learning ability. Consequently, as from the late seventies hardly any studies have been carried out on aptitude (De Bot, K., Lowie, W. and Verspoor, 2005).
As it is mentioned above, in the early 1990s research on language aptitude come into vogue again. Recent approaches take into account that aptitude has shown to be a good predictor of achievement in classroom second-language learning. Language learning aptitude needs to be redefined to include creative and practical languageacquisition abilities. Whatever the future of research into language aptitude may be, recent work has shown that the discussion on aptitude is very much alive after a relatively silent period of about thirty years. The focus of recent study of language learning aptitude is on attempts to redefine it in such a way that it includes communicative skills. To respond this phenomena and demand, this study is conducted.
Therefore, the purposes of the research are reflected in the following research questions: (1) Is there any correlation between the students' language learning aptitude and their speaking performance? (2) Can the result of the language learning aptitude become a predictor to the success of performing spoken English properly?

METHOD Respondents
A big group of students, as population, attending an English course taught by the researcher were randomly assigned. The numbers of the assigned students, as samples, consisted of 25 persons. The students were selected from the English for Teens (ET) level at an English course in Cimahi. They were asked to take language learning aptitude test which is adapted from the MLAT and one-way information exchange and two-way information exchange. The average age of the students was 13.88 years-old (see Table 1).

Instruments
Students took the language learning aptitude test which is adapted from MLAT. The test is divided into five elements which are number learning, phonetic script, spelling cues, words in sentences, and paired associates. In paired associates' section, students are tested to know numbers in the second language (in this case English) by listening to them and then choosing one of the options in the first language (Indonesian). Students have to match English words with their pronunciation by listening as well in phonetic script section. Spelling cues section assesses students' knowledge of English spelling by reading the word and picking up one of the choices in a test item. Students are expected to find a word function in a sentence which has the same function in a sentence example in words in sentences section by reading the sentences. Last but not least, students' memory of English vocabulary is tested in paired associates' section. This was used to determine the levels of the students' language learning aptitude.

Procedures
After the results of their aptitude were collected, they were asked to perform their speaking ability. The students were asked to perform six different tasks, three of them involving one-way information exchange (giving instructions, speech, and discuss a given topic) and three involving two-way information exchange (making conversation and playing two communication games) (Ellis, 1994). In the first task, students were asked to give three different instructions to their each partner. After that they gave speech based on their favorite topic. The last activity in the first task was that they discussed a given topic with their partners. The given topic in this discussion was entitled 'My Ambition'. Students talked about their each hobby in making conversation in the first activity in the second task. Then they played two communication games which demanding them to interact each other. In the first game one of them had a secret object which had to be guessed correctly by the other whereas the second game asked them to continue their partners' sentence by making the last word of a sentence as their first word to start a new sentence. The students' speaking performance was measured by three scales: their fluency, pronunciation, and accuracy.
The results of this activity were converted into three different scores. The fluency, pronunciation, and accuracy score which is adapted from Chomsky's definition of performance. Next, a correlation between the result of their aptitude test and speaking performance are determined to discover whether there is any correlation between the students' language learning aptitude and their speaking performance and if the result of the language learning aptitude can become a predictor to the success of performing oral English properly.

Data Analysis
As it is mentioned above, a language learning aptitude test as the first instrument was administered to measure the students' language learning aptitude score. The test is divided into five elements which are number learning, phonetic script, spelling cues, words in sentences, and paired associates.
Levels of the students' speaking performance were determined by adapting Long's method in his research in 1980. Some steps were taken to get the score of the elements in this instrument. First, the students' mistakes and errors were counted when they were performing the tasks. In fluency section, a pause means a mistake. The longer pauses the students made in seconds, the worse score they have. The numbers of mispronounced words were counted during students' performance. And it is put in pronunciation section. Let alone the students' grammatical mistakes and errors which were recorded in accuracy section. The analysis is based on Chomsky's definition of performance. The results of this record were converted into a new scale (1-100) by using a grading score table (see table 6).
To measure the correlation between the results of students' language learning aptitude and speaking performance, a correlational analyzes from (Hatch, E., and Farhady, 1982) was chosen (see table 8). After the data collected, the following action was that the data was put into a formula to find the correlational coefficient and then it was interpreted.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
This section is divided into three parts. They are the language learning aptitude test findings, the speaking performance task findings, and the correlational analyzes. The findings which are revealed from each section of the study is interpreted and followed by discussion from several relevant points of views. To give easier illustration, numerous tables are provided.

Language Learning Aptitude Test Findings
The first table which put forward the result of the language learning aptitude test. From the average score of this table (84.57), it can be interpreted that all of the samples have high aptitude and its level is elaborated in the following table. The students' each score is converted into some predicates (i. e. very high, high, moderate, low, and very low). These divisions are taken from the scale of the score (1-100) divided into five to be equal to its categorization.  To know whether there is any difference between male and female students, the next table shows the average score of male and female students. From its result, we can compare who have higher aptitude between those two groups of students. And then it is followed by a discussion from gender point of view.  Table 3 shows that the female students have slightly higher language learning aptitude than the male students. This particular finding supports an assumption that says women are better than men in terms of language intelligence which is proposed by Gardner (1983) with his multiple intelligence theory.  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  88  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100   88  77  88  77  55  88  88  88  79  78  79  78  79  79  76  79  100  66  77  77  88  44  77  55  100   100  100  100  83  100  83  83  100  84  85  84  85  84  82  84  81  66  83  83  100  66  100  66  83  33   83  83  66  83  83  66  66  50  62  62  61  61  60  62  62  60  50  66  50  33  50  50  50  50  50   100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100  100   471  460  454  443  438  437  437  433  425  425  424  424  423  423  422  422  416  415  410  410  404  394  393  388 Table 4 shows that overall, the students don't have any problem with acquiring the second language target vocabulary and numbers except one student. However, in Level of significance = 0.05 Critical values of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient = 0.4227 (based on the table of the critical values). 0.34 < 0.4227 It means that there is any correlation between students' language learning aptitude and their speaking performance.

CONCLUSION
It must be acknowledged that the present sample is relatively small and that the findings cannot be generalized since it is contextual study. However, the evidence from this study has shown that, as it is mentioned above, there is any correlation between students' language learning aptitude and their speaking performance. Therefore, the result of the language learning aptitude can become a predictor to the success of performing oral English properly. If students' language learning aptitude is conducted before they take an English subject, as they are in this study, the teacher can have preliminary feedback about his or her students' strength and weaknesses in learning English as a second or foreign language. The feedback can be data-based information for the teacher to prepare class syllabus to improve either his or her students' skills or their knowledge of the target language. Another conclusion is that from the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) point of view, learning the structure (the form) of the second language should be done explicitly since from the result of the language learning aptitude and the speaking performance test, it is a difficult part in which the score of this part is the lowest one (see table 4 and 5).
In summary, the present research with its setting provides strong support for the success of English teaching-learning in classroom by giving data of students' language learning aptitude and further research may focus on aptitude-based syllabus.