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ELICITED IMITATION AS A MEASURE OF L2 PROFICIENCY

NEW INSIGHTS FROM A COMPARISON OF TWO L2 ENGLISH PARALLEL FORMS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2021

Shu-Ling Wu Open the ORCID record for Shu-Ling Wu [Opens in a new window] ,
Yee Pin Tio  and
Lourdes Ortega
Shu-Ling Wu*
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Yee Pin Tio*
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Lourdes Ortega*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Shu-Ling Wu, PhD, Associate Professor and Chinese Section Head, Director of Foreign Language and International Trade Program, Department of Languages, Cultures, and International Trade, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois 62901. Email: shulingwu@siu.edu
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Abstract

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.

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Type
Methods Forum
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 271 - 300
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The experiment in this article earned an Open Materials badge for transparent practices. The materials are available at the IRIS database (http://www.iris-database.org).

The authors thank I-Ru Su, Chien-Hui Hsu, Chenyue Guo, Shu-Ping Wu, and Wentao Li for their help with data collection, and all participants for their time. We are also very grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors or oversights are our own.

†

This article has been updated since its original publication. See https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263121000607.

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