A corpus‐driven, curriculum‐based Chinese elicited imitation test in US universities

Abstract

The Challenge There is an increasing number of general language proficiency tests available for teachers and program administrators in less commonly taught languages programs. However, are these tests well linked to the language curriculum in your context? How useful are they for placement, diagnosis, and achievement purposes? This article presents a corpus-driven, curriculum-based approach to assessing proficiency development of Mandarin Chinese, a less commonly taught language (LCTL) in US universities. The full version of the test is provided, and the methodological implications of the corpusdriven, curriculum-based approach for the assessment of Chinese as well as other LCTLs are also discussed.

Editorial: Individual differences in second/foreign language speech production: multidisciplinary approaches and new sounds

“…Elicited imitation (EI) is an effective measure of L2 proficiency (Yan et al, 2016(Yan et al, , 2020. It requires participants to listen to a series of stimulus sentences, phrases, words, or sounds and then repeat them verbatim (Underhill, 1987).…”

An Exploratory Study of Strategy Use on Elicited Imitation Tasks

“…For L2 learners, when the stimulus sentence goes beyond their current level of the target language, such as containing unfamiliar vocabulary or presenting new grammatical structures, they are likely to repeat only part of the sentence (the part that they can understand) correctly at best or, at worst, fail to repeat the entire sentence. Therefore, EI responses can reveal L2 learners' strengths and weaknesses in linguistic knowledge and skills, which can facilitate teaching, learning, and other test score uses (Yan et al, 2020). Meta-analysis studies demonstrate that EI, as a general L2 proficiency measure, has a strong ability to discriminate speakers across proficiency levels (Yan et al, 2016;Kostromitina and Plonsky, 2021) and higher reliability compared to other speaking tasks (Henning, 1983).…”

“…Following the common practice of administering EI as a proficiency test (Ortega et al, 2002), a 2-s silence was inserted between the end of each sentence and a 0.5-s ringtone prompting the start of the repetition. The EI test went through an iterative process of development and validation and demonstrated good psychometric qualities (Yan et al, 2020). 1 Sample EI sentences of each level are provided below.…”