Problems in phonemic length discrimination could be one of the accumulating risk factors affecting development leading to dyslexia.

The paper explores the nature of cross-linguistic influence in morphology. 30 Estonian (a closely related L1) and 30 Russian (a non-related L1) beginning and advanced learners of L2 Finnish were tested for their skills in nominal inflection in three different tasks: separate nouns of morphophonologically varying inflectional categories to be inflected in several plural case forms in writing, the same nouns to be used in a narrative writing task and in an oral inflection task. The nouns were selected to represent various degrees of inflectional and/or semantic similarity between Finnish and Estonian (for Russian no such similarity exists). The results indicate that -in opposition to what has been previously claimed -not only does cross-linguistic influence exist within the domain of morphology but it also varies systematically across inflectional categories and between groups at different levels of general skills in Finnish.

There is relatively little research on how well the CEFR and similar holistic scales work when they are used to rate L2 texts. Using both multifaceted Rasch analyses and qualitative data from rater comments and interviews, the ratings obtained by using a CEFR-based writing scale and the Finnish National Core Curriculum scale for L2 writing were examined to validate the rating process used in the study of the linguistic basis of the CEFR in L2 Finnish and English. More specifically, we explored the quality of the ratings and the rating scales across different tasks and across the two languages. The relationship of task peformance across the scales and languages was also examined. The kinds of analyses reported here are relevant to other SLA studies that use rating scales in their data gathering process.

With the advent of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for the learning, teaching and assessment of modern languages, there have been renewed calls for the integration of the research perspectives of language testing and second language acquisition across Europe. The project Cefling was set up in 2006 with this purpose in mind. In the project our aim is to describe the features of language that L2 learners use at various levels of language proficiency defined by the CEFR scales. For this purpose, L2 Finnish and L2 English data were collected from young and adult L2 learners by using a set of communicative L2 writing tasks. In the course of the project, the different understandings of what the purpose of an L2 writing task is needed to be reconciled not only in the minds of researchers but also in research design. In what follows, we will discuss the issues involved in designing and assessing L2 tasks for SLA and language testing purposes by using the design and assessment procedures in the project as a case in point. We will also present some of our findings to illustrate how statistical procedures such as multifaceted Rasch analysis can be used to examine task difficulty.EUROSLA MONOGRAPHS SERIES 1 Communicative proficiency and linguistic development, 21-56

Prereading skills are connected to poor reading skills, but phonemic length discrimination ability plays a critical role in spelling accuracy problems among children with reading disabilities and with familial risk for dyslexia.