Journal Article

ELICITED IMITATION AS A MEASURE OF L2 PROFICIENCY

Wu, Shu-Ling, Ortega, Lourdes, Tio, Yee Pin

2022

Overview

Elicited imitation (EI), a short-cut measure of global proficiency in second language (L2) research, requires participants to listen to sentences and repeat them as closely as possible. To support instrument sharing and assessment of L2 proficiency for longitudinal and crosslinguistic research, we created a parallel form of an EI task (EIT) for L2 English originally developed by the third author and colleagues and investigated the reliability and validity of the original and new forms. Eighty-two participants completed the two EITs, an oral narrative task, and a self-diagnostic survey. Both forms exhibited high reliability and good alignment with external criterion measures. Both distinguished well among four proficiency levels in the sample. Further, participants’ perception of EI difficulty aligned well with their EI scores. We suggest some improvements to boost forms equivalence and discuss new insights about the nature of EI as reconstructive, integrative, modality independent, and with indirect links to communicative abilities. Our study seeks to make this English EIT instrument widely useful to the L2 research community.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Communicative competence / Communicative Competence (Languages) / Community research / Comparative Analysis / Competence / Contrastive Linguistics / Difficulty Level / Emotional intelligence / English (Second Language) / English as a second language / English as a second language learning / French as a second language / Imitation / Knowledge / Language / Language Acquisition / Language Proficiency / Linguistics / Longitudinal Studies / Measurement Techniques / Measures / Narration / Oral Language / Reliability / Researchers / Scores / Second Language Instruction / Second Language Learning / Self Evaluation (Individuals) / Selfdiagnosis / Standardized Tests / Task Analysis / Validity