The effect of the study of a foreign language in the elementary school on scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and an analysis of student-participant attitudes and abilities

This study was designed to determine the effect of the study of a foreign language in the elementary school on scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and to analyze student-participant attitudes and abilities. The study was performed on a specific program, the Georgia Elementary School Foreign Languages Model Program (Model Program), which has content-related as well as language and culture goals.;A dependent sample t-test was performed comparing foreign language and non-foreign language treatment groups on the third-grade subtests of the ITBS. A blocking design used school composite scores as the unit of analysis ;A 25-item questionnaire was administered to 822 fourth-grade Model Program student-participants enrolled in one of four foreign languages: French, German, Japanese or Spanish. The students indicated positive attitudes towards their foreign language class, towards foreign language study in general and towards the people who speak their foreign language. The students expressed a moderate degree of anxiety in speaking the language to a native speaker, but did not have a high degree of anxiety in their foreign language class. Students indicated that they had been studying content-related subjects in their foreign language class, especially math. They also self-reported that they had skills in speaking, reading and writing their foreign language. For listening comprehension, one third of the students indicated that they understood their foreign language teacher. The majority of students, however, indicated that they understood their teacher sometimes.;The findings were that foreign language study does not interfere with basic skills and may even be a factor in improved test scores. This content-related FLES design did lead to both foreign language proficiency and improvement in content areas. Finally, the fact that students did have listening proficiency even though they believed that they did not always understand their teacher, supports the extensive use of the foreign language at Krashen's (1983) input + 1 level for all aspects of classroom foreign language instruction.