SLA Elicitation Tasks

Gass, Susan M.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_15

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The grammaticality judgment test was administered as the pretest and posttest (immediate and 1‐week delayed). The grammaticality judgment test was chosen as a dependent measure because it is a commonly used tool for assessing L2 linguistic knowledge (Gass, ). Participants were presented with 40 sentences sequentially and were instructed to press the left arrow on the keyboard for a grammatical sentence and the right arrow for an ungrammatical sentence.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mixing Grammar Exercises Facilitates Long‐Term Retention: Effects of Blocking, Interleaving, and Increasing Practice

Nakata

Suzuki

2019

The Modern Language Journal

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Cognitive psychology research has shown that interleaving, wherein learners practice multiple skills or concepts at once, facilitates learning more than does blocking, wherein learners practice only one skill or concept at a time. Despite the advantage of interleaving over blocking observed across a number of domains, limited attention has been devoted to the effects of interleaving on second language (L2) learning. This study examined the effects of blocking and interleaving on L2 grammar learning. In this study, 115 Japanese learners studied 5 English grammatical structures under 1 of 3 conditions: blocking, interleaving, and increasing (i.e., blocking followed by interleaving). Learning was measured using a grammaticality judgment test administered immediately and 1 week after the treatment. Although interleaving led to the highest number of incorrect responses during training, it was more effective than blocking in the 1‐week delayed posttest. These results indicate that the advantage of interleaving extends to L2 grammar learning. Furthermore, learners’ levels of prior knowledge were found to moderate the effects of interleaving. Specifically, participants with lower pretest scores benefited more from interleaving compared to those with higher pretest scores. Pedagogically, the findings suggest that grammar learning may be enhanced by incorporating interleaved practice.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mixing Grammar Exercises Facilitates Long‐Term Retention: Effects of Blocking, Interleaving, and Increasing Practice

Nakata

Suzuki

2019

The Modern Language Journal

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“…As a testing method, an elicited imitation test (EIT) usually requires participants to listen to a stimulus and then repeat that stimulus verbatim (Underhill 1987). This procedure is then repeated for a series of different stimuli that can differ on a number of dimensions, depending on the objective of test (e.g., greater syntactic complexity, increasing syllable length, performing an activity before repetition, for reviews see Yan et al 2016;Gass 2018). An underlying claim of the EIT is that 'in order for the learner to be able to correctly imitate the target language structure, it must be part of the learner's interlanguage system' (Erlam 2006: 467, see also Jessop, Suzuki & Tomita 2007;Rebuschat & Mackey 2013;Tracy-Ventura et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using elicited imitation to measure global oral proficiency in SLA research: A close replication study

McManus

Liu

2020

Lang. Teach.

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We closely replicated Wu and Ortega (2013), who found that an elicited imitation test (EIT) reliably distinguished low-level from high-level language abilities among instructed second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese. The original study sampled learners (1) from second-level courses to represent low-level language abilities and (2) from third-, fourth- and graduate-level courses to represent high-level language abilities. Results showed high-level learners outperformed low-level learners on the Mandarin EIT. Our close replication used Wu and Ortega's (2013) materials and procedures in order to understand (1) the extent to which this EIT can additionally distinguish between finer-grained language abilities and (2) the ways in which the broad grouping of language abilities in the high group may have contributed to the findings. Sixty-five instructed L2 learners from four instructional levels were assigned to one of three groups: Beginner (first-level courses), Low (second-level courses), High (third- and fourth-level courses). Consistent with the original study, our results showed clear between-group differences, indicating that the EIT can distinguish between both broad (beginner vs high) and finer-grained (beginner vs low, low vs high) language abilities. These results are discussed in light of the original study's findings with implications for proficiency assessment in second language acquisition (SLA) research.

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“…Researchers assume that if EI taps into receptive and productive oral skills it can serve as a reliable indicator of oral language proficiency, L2 grammar, or implicit language knowledge (Gass, 2018). Given the topic of the current article, we focus primarily on the studies of EI as a proxy for oral language proficiency.…”

Section: Elicited Imitation In Slamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Four prompt features have been shown to impact EI performance (Gass, 2018;Vinther, 2002 ;Yan et al, 2016): (a) prompt length, (b) immediate or delayed repetition, (c) prompt grammaticality, and (d) lexical complexity. First, across numerous studies there is consensus that prompt length, as measured by the number of syllables per sentence, is the most robust predictor of EI score variance (Vinther, 2002;Yan et al, 2016).…”

Section: Elicited Imitation In Slamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EI has not only been used extensively to research children's L1 development and to assess verbal working memory (VWM) capacity but also in SLA, where researchers have employed it as an indirect measure of adult oral L2 proficiency since the 1950s (e.g., Carroll et al, 1959). During the past decade, interest in EI has spiked again, notably as an indicator of holistic speaking proficiency, implicit language knowledge, and L2 grammar (Gass, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Elicited Imitation: A Test for All Learners?

Deygers

2020

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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Elicited imitation (EI) is a much-used measurement instrument in applied linguistics, and it is considered a reliable and quick assessment of holistic speaking ability and implicit grammar knowledge. To date, however, EI research has overwhelmingly relied on highly educated participants. Only a few small-scale EI studies in applied linguistics have considered low-literate learners. Using Item Response Theory (IRT) and inferential parametric and nonparametric statistics, this study examined the EI performance of 113 L2 learners of Dutch with diverging educational backgrounds. All participants were enrolled in A1 and A2 Dutch L2 courses. Additionally, this study examined to what extent EI performances align with standardized tests of speaking and receptive vocabulary. The results indicate that EI can be used with both highly literate and low-educated participants, who will—however—be outperformed by higher educated learners. Especially the repetition of sentences containing pseudowords appears to result in substantial performance differences between the two groups.

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SLA Elicitation Tasks

Cited by 5 publications

References 52 publications

Mixing Grammar Exercises Facilitates Long‐Term Retention: Effects of Blocking, Interleaving, and Increasing Practice

Mixing Grammar Exercises Facilitates Long‐Term Retention: Effects of Blocking, Interleaving, and Increasing Practice

Using elicited imitation to measure global oral proficiency in SLA research: A close replication study

Elicited Imitation: A Test for All Learners?

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