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as attitudes toward interlanguage represents a growing area of concern to language teachers who wish to know how native speakers will respond to language learners' speech. Such knowledge would enable language teachers to determine classroom priorities based on practical realities of communication between native and nonnative speakers. Theoretical issues such as the definition and characterization of attitudes toward interlanguage may not appear to be of practical value, but the various conceptions of attitude and of interlanguage constitute a confused approach to this important problem. Most studies produced on attitudes toward interlanguage skirt theory in order to explore issues of immediate interest to language teachers, but variations in theory and method make reproduction or refutation of previous study results difficult, a state of affairs which is not conducive to a dynamic field of inquiry that uses research to revise and update applications of theory.There are at least two important sources of variation in interlanguage attitude studies. Speech samples from nonnatives, which are used to elicit native speaker (NS) attitudes, are obtained in many ways. The particular type of sample obtained operationally defines "interlanguage." Speech samples used in interlanguage attitude studies range from artificial, isolated pairs of unrelated sentences containing errors typical of student speech to audio-video tapes of connected discourse. A second source of variation in interlanguage attitude studies is the particular questionnaire used to define an attitude construct. These sources of variation interact to produce a vast array of objects of study.An empirical investigation of interlanguage attitudes based on a theoretical framework pro-The Modern Language Journal, 68, iv (1984) 0026-7902/84/0004/315 $1.50/0 @ 1984 The Modern Lanpage Journal vided by social psychologists is discussed in this report. The evidence produced contributes to a clarification of the object of interlanguage attitude studies. Native and nonnative (NN) narratives elicited by a series of photographs are taped and presented to native speakers from a variety of backgrounds. The questionnaire used to rate these samples of Spanish consists of three kinds of questions. One type requires the NS to agree or disagree with statements about formal aspects of the speech sample. A second type requires the NS to indicate whether or not he likes the speech, and a third type requires the informant to indicate his socio-affective response to the person speaking. Statistical analysis demonstrates that attitudes toward speech are measurably distinct from attitudes toward the person speaking. The analysis also suggests that interlanguage attitudes are basically evaluative in nature, not affective. PREVIOUS RESEARCHLudwig, in a recent review of judgments of language learners' efforts to communicate, summarized the relevant research in the areas of comprehensibility, irritation, acceptability, communicative strategies and paralanguage, personality, native versus no...

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