The Modern Language Aptitude Test was designed to predict a student’s likelihood of success and ease in learning a foreign language.
The Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) was developed to measure foreign language learning aptitude. Language learning aptitude does not refer to whether or not an individual can or cannot learn a foreign language (it is assumed that virtually everyone can learn a foreign language given adequate opportunity). According to John Carroll and Stanley Sapon, the authors of the MLAT, language learning aptitude refers to the “prediction of how well, relative to other individuals, an individual can learn a foreign language in a given amount of time and under given conditions.” The MLAT has primarily been used for adults in government language programs and missionaries, but it is also appropriate for students in grades 9 to 12 as well as college/university students so it is also used by private schools and school and clinical psychologists. Similar tests have been created for younger age groups. For example, the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery was designed for junior high and high school students while the MLAT-E is for children in grades 3 through 6.
Read more about Modern Language Aptitude Test: Development, Uses of The Modern Language Aptitude Test, Modern Language Aptitude Test – Elementary, Issues of Debate, Resources
Famous quotes containing the words modern, language and/or test:
“In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.
For he, to whom we had applied
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,
As he was ancient at his birth:”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)