Given that 10 years have passed since the publication of the most recent synthesis of proficiency assessment standards, the present review revisits proficiency assessment practices in research on second language acquisition (SLA), with the goal of examining whether the way in which scholars measure and report proficiency has changed. Our sample included 500 studies from five major SLA‐related journals published between 2012 and 2019. The findings indicate that whereas over 90% of the studies assessed and reported second language proficiency in some way, only 42% of them did so with an independent measure. In line with previous surveys, the most popular assessment technique was institutional status, suggesting that relatively little change has taken place over time. Use or not of an independent measure of proficiency was also found to differ by certain study characteristics (e.g., learner population, research context), providing insight into areas of focus for future improvement.

While an elicited imitation test (EIT) has been widely used as a measure of oral proficiency in second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is still unclear the extent to which memory capacity impacts EIT performance. In light of this gap, the present study sought to clarify the nature of elicited imitation by examining the relative contributions of language ability and phonological short‐term memory (PSTM) to EIT performance. Seventy‐eight second language (L2) learners of Spanish, who were grouped into 3 Spanish experience levels, took a Spanish EIT, an L2 oral narrative task, and a nonword repetition (NWR) task in their first language. Results demonstrated that learners’ EIT performance was primarily predicted by complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) measures extracted from the oral narrative task rather than NWR scores, which served as an index for PSTM capacity. Furthermore, the present study provided suggestive evidence that PSTM capacity may differentially mediate EIT performance depending on the extent of learners’ proficiency in and experience with Spanish. While facilitative effects for PSTM capacity were observed for less experienced learners, no effects were found for more experienced learners.

This study examines a 30-item Spanish elicited imitation task (EIT) as a measure of global language proficiency for heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish. Results from Rasch modeling suggest that, while EIT scores demonstrated excellent reliability, the ability of much of the HL sample far exceeded the difficulty of the items. Differential item functioning analysis revealed that several items functioned differently for the present study’s HL sample than for the second language learners from a prior study. Additionally, although EIT scores were strongly correlated with another proficiency measure for the present HL sample (e.g., the Diploma de español como lengua extranjera or DELE), common-person equating suggested that the EIT and the DELE may measure different latent variables. Overall, the results provide evidence of the EIT’s utility as a proficiency assessment tool for research on HL learners, however, with limitations and the need for additional analyses discussed.