This article considers the key concepts of elicited imitation (EI), with the aim of contributing to the understanding of this technique for language testing. EI has been widely debated and often criticized, but there seems now to be an agreement as to its usefulness, as long as it is applied with great care. The article reviews the literature on EI and suggests some issues for discussion, such as the process of imitating, the length and structure of the stimulus, contextual support, whether the test evaluates comprehension or production skills, whether it assesses imitative or spontaneous language capacity, and how scoring is carried out. Although the focus is on foreign language acquisition (FLA), studies about EI within other areas have been included where this is considered useful for the understanding of the technique.

This study reports on two experiments on input enhancement used to support learners' selection of focus of attention in second language listening material. Eighty-four upper intermediate learners of Spanish took part. The input consisted of video recordings of quasispontaneous dialogues between native speakers, in tests and treatment. Exact repetition and speech rate reduction were examined for their effect on comprehension, acquisition of decoding strategies, and linguistic features. Each of three groups listened to each utterance of the dialogue three times, in different speed combinations: fast-slow-fast, fast-slow-slow, fast-fast-fast, respectively. A fourth group served as a baseline and received no Eva Dam Jensen and Thora Vinther, Department of Romance Languages.This study was supported financially by the National Research Council for the Humanities. We wish to express our gratitude to Teresa Cadierno, Craig Chaudron, and Sandi M. de Oliveira for their valuable comments on a previous version of this article. We also wish to thank the editors and reviewers for excellent support. We also want to thank Inger Mees for her insightful editorial comments and her enthusiasm. We are indebted to Teresa Cadierno for her help with data collection at the University of Å rhus and to Jørgen Schultz of Waves International for technical help with segmenting the videos used in the experiment. We are also grateful to Svend-Erik Lystlund for instructing us in the use of the mingograph and to Niels Reinholt Petersen for helping us analyze the mingograms produced. We owe special thanks to Niels Reinholt Petersen and Werner Vach for their invaluable help in the statistical analyses.

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