THE ROLE OF MOTIVATION, STRATEGY USE AND SECOND LANGUAGE APTITUDE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LISTENING SKILLS BY ADULT CHINESE LEARNERS

This research has investigated the associations among strategy use, language learning aptitude and motivation and their impact on predicting the development of listening skills of Spanish-Catalan bilingual beginner learners studying Chinese. The participants were 13 Spanish-Catalan bilingual students majoring in International Business and Tourism in a school in Barcelona, taking Chinese as an optional language course for their first year of study. All of them were raised in Catalonia speaking Catalan and Spanish, except for one student originally from Morocco. In addition, all of them had an intermediate level of English (CEFR: B1-B2). The experiment consisted of a motivation questionnaire, Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), LLAMA_D, a pre-test and three post-tests (i.e. listening tests) in each month during the 3 month research period. The collected data was analysed through the Spearman correlation coefficient and the results of the effects on Chinese listening gains display that motivation was found to be a strong predictor of the development of Chinese listening gains. Strategy use has a significant positive effect, but the very strong correlation was only found in the first stages, the effect decreased later on. Instead, language learning aptitude had a non-significant effect as measured by LLAMA_D. Article visualizations: