Development and Preliminary Validation of a Foreign Language Aptitude Test for Chinese Learners of Foreign Languages

This study aims to develop a foreign language (FL) aptitude test for Chinese FL learners and to examine the validity of the test. A test with six subtests was constructed and administered to 158 Chinese high school and college students. Rasch analyses showed that the test had high reliability, the vast majority of the items in each subtest exhibited good fit to the Rasch model and all the subtests showed good unidimensionality except for the subtest measuring auditory associative memory and inductive language learning ability. Overall, the test was of appropriate difficulty, but one subtest was found to be too easy for the students. The students' scores on all the subtests correlated significantly with each other, except for one subtest measuring phonetic coding ability and vocabulary in Chinese. Additionally, significant correlations were found between a subgroup of students' aptitude scores and their English achievement scores.