Chapter 2.03.02: Designing and Assessing L2 Writing Tasks Across CEFR Proficiency Levels

Abstract

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

On cross‐linguistic variation and measures of linguistic complexity in learner texts: Italian, French and English

“…The two tasks used in the present study were adapted versions of two tasks used by Alanen, Huhta, and Tarnanen () in a CEFR‐linked study of young and adult learners' L2 English and L2 Finnish in Finland (the Cefling project). We wanted to use the same two tasks with all the participant groups, and target slightly different domains, registers, functions and linguistic structures in order to allow for a comparison of two different writing tasks.…”

“…The two tasks used in the present study were adapted versions of two tasks used by Alanen, Huhta, and Tarnanen (2010) in a CEFR-linked study of young and adult learners' L2 English and L2 Finnish in Finland (the Cefling project).…”

Building a Corpus of 2L English for Automatic Assessment: The CLEC Corpus

“…Since then, there have been many groups, projects and research activities dealing with language testing and second language acquisition across Europe. One of the main goals has been the identification of criterial features for L2 English for each CEFR level (Salamoura and Saville, 2010), basic aim of the Cefling project (Alanen, Huhta, and Tarnanen, 2010) or the English Profile project (Hendriks, 2008;and Kurtes and Saville, 2008), among others.…”

“…Thus, following Alanen, Huhta, and Tarnanen (2010) and Hulstijn, Alderson, and Schoonen (2010), and their insights on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and language testing research, we have decided to collect data from existing language texts already classified according to CEFR levels and analyze them in terms of linguistic features (Banerjee, Franceschina, and Smith, 2004;Norris, 1996;Norris and Ortega, 2009). …”

Discriminating CEFR levels in Greek L2: a corpus-based study of young learners’ written narratives

“…the impact of various L1 to L2 features. Similarly, the correspondence between L2 research findings and the CEFR is the major research objective of the SLATE network (Second Language Acquisition and Testing in Europe), within which many target languages have been investigated, such as Dutch (Kuiken, Vedder, and Gilabert 2010), Finnish (Alanen, Huhta, and Tarnanen 2010;Martin et al 2010), French (Forsberg and Bartning 2010;Prodeau, Lopez, and Véronique 2012), Italian (Kuiken, Vedder, and Gilabert 2010), Norwegian (Carlsen 2010) and Spanish (Kuiken, Vedder, and Gilabert 2010). These studies use learner corpora, which are analyzed with respect to grammatical features, pragmatic and textual characteristics.…”