As students, of course, we don’t need an excuse to have a drink, but what if we told you that we have found an excellent one. Research from Maastricht University has shown that the language performance of someone speaking a foreign language improves after consuming a small amount of alcohol, particularly when it comes to their pronunciation. And what more do we want as International Studies students?
The research conducted by researchers from Maastricht University observes fifty German bachelor students of Psychology who had been studying Dutch as a foreign language for a significant amount of time. The students already had a high enough level of the language that they were following their bachelor’s program in Dutch. This research looks at how high participants who had just consumed a small amount of alcohol would rate their own use of the foreign language, as well as how native speakers of the language would rate the ability of the students to speak it. The results of the two ratings under study were compared to a control group of students who were only given water to drink. The researchers deliberately decided not to use a placebo drink (a drink that tastes like it contains real alcohol but does not) because they believe this might have the same effects as real alcohol has.
To assess the performance of the students speaking in Dutch after the consumption of alcohol, they had them speak about animal testing for about two minutes. This conversation was rated on multiple skills, such as vocabulary and pronunciation, by two native Dutch speakers who did not know whether the student had consumed alcohol or not. Directly after this, they had asked the students to rate their use of the language on the same skills as the native speakers did, as well as their level of self-esteem. Both the self-ratings and observer-ratings were then put on separate scales, which showed the language skills of the student on a range from 0 to 100.
The research showed that the students who had consumed alcohol prior to the test did not show higher ratings of their self-rated language skills while speaking in Dutch than the students who had consumed water. This means that they were not more confident about their use of the language than the sober students. This contradicts the widely-held belief that the performance of foreign language speakers improves due to a higher degree of confidence. However, the observations of the native Dutch speakers do show that the students who had consumed alcohol performed considerably better on their speaking test than those in the control group. The higher performance ratings mostly came from higher scores on pronunciation and fluency, while the ratings on vocabulary and grammar were not much higher for the alcohol-consuming group. It is, however, important to consider that this study was conducted with a low dosage of alcohol and only tested the language acquisition of one language. A higher dosage and a different language might create very different results.
Even though alcohol consumption will not make you miraculously fluent in your target language, it could definitely help you a little bit. So, next time you are in a bar, try to find a native speaker of your target language and just go for it. Who knows what will happen?
Bibliography:
Renner, Fritz, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann. “Dutch Courage? Effects of Acute Alcohol Consumption on Self-ratings and Observer Ratings of Foreign Language Skills.” Journal of Psychopharmacology 32, no. 1 (2017): 116-122.
BAISmag 