Interaction between attitude and context in the prediction of language proficiency in multilinguals: The case of Taiwan.

Language attitudes are crucial in determining language preservation. However, most research on language attitudes has only compared languages/dialects spoken widely in and belonging to a society (e.g., Mandarin, Taiwanese), and contextual factors (including socio-political history) have not been systematically considered in large-scale quantitative studies. Therefore, the current study aimed to determine the extent to which the Taiwan context would affect the strength of attitudes on the prediction of language proficiency by targeting languages differing in status: Mandarin Chinese (official language), Taiwanese (mutually unintelligible ‘dialect’ of Chinese spoken by around 70% of the population), English (compulsory school subject), Japanese (previously taught during Japanese rule [1895-1945]) and French (rarely learned). Taiwanese participants recruited through a community centre course (non-language) in Taipei completed an online questionnaire that was designed following the most common cognitivist language-attitude model positing three major components: cognition, affect, and behavioural intention (e.g., Baker, 1992). For each language, participants were asked to rate their proficiency, belief about others’ proficiency levels (i.e., cognition), semantic differentials (i.e., cognitive & affective; e.g., weak – strong, Maguire, 1973), and desire to learn (i.e., behavioural intention). Overall, participants had the most positive attitude towards compulsory languages (English, Mandarin) and higher desire to learn relevant foreign languages (English, Japanese). In line with past research, participants who were ‘more’ multilingual reported higher desire to learn relevant languages; however, they also expressed less-positive attitudes toward compulsory languages. The major contribution of this paper is the inclusion of context, including socio-political history, in the creation of a model predicting language proficiency. More specifically, multilevel path analysis revealed that the effect of participants’ cognition and affect on self-perceived proficiency (i.e., level 1) was significantly affected by two contextual factors (i.e., level 2): language-specific measures of average desire to learn and the extent to which each language ‘belonged’ to the speakers.