Proficiency Assessment Standards in Second Language Acquisition Research

Abstract

The present study aims to sensitize SLA researchers to the importance of documenting and controlling for their participants’ proficiency in the target language, with the goal of establishing more robust proficiency assessment standards in experimental research. First, this article presents a survey of recent (2000–2008) foreign and second-language (L2) acquisition studies that show that such standards have yet to be met. Second, it demonstrates the validity, reliability, and practicality of a cloze (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) test designed to discriminate among L2 learners of French at different proficiency levels. Subject and item analyses are performed on the cloze test scores of 169 L2 learners of French from various language backgrounds. The relationship between these scores and the learners’ language background is examined. Cutoff points between proficiency levels are identified in the data. The test then is shared with scholars so that those working with a similar population of L2 learners of French can also use it.

Working memory capacity in L2 processing

“…In the first session, participants saw all ERP test items in L2 French; they also completed a language background questionnaire, a cloze test (Tremblay 2011), and a verbal WM task in French . The cloze test was a fill-in-the-blank task where participants completed a paragraph requiring a range of French lexical and grammatical knowledge.…”

“…We assessed participants' L2 proficiency with a self-report language background questionnaire and a cloze test (Tremblay 2011), and we assessed WM capacity in both French and English with a reading-span task . We used the participants' word-recall scores (shown in Table 1) as index of WM capacity, as these scores did not correlate with proficiency in French.…”

Differential contribution of prosodic cues in the native and non-native segmentation of French speech

“…Their proficiency in French was identified with the help of a cloze (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) test independently shown to provide a reliable estimate of proficiency in French (Tremblay and Garrison 2010;Tremblay 2011). The participants were evenly divided into two proficiency groups (mid, high) on the basis of their cloze test scores.…”

French Speech Segmentation in Liaison Contexts by L1 and L2 Listeners

“…These ratings will be considered in the analysis and interpretation of the results. The final task was the cloze test designed to assess proficiency in French (Tremblay, 2011b). In total, the experimental session lasted 40 to 50 minutes on average.…”

“…Participants completed an externally validated cloze test (Tremblay, 2011b) following the main experiment to assess proficiency in French. Most L2-French participants were recruited from intermediate-level French courses (others were found via the Northwestern Linguistics Department subject pool), and the intermediate proficiency of this group was confirmed by the cloze test: Our participants showed a similar mean percent correct and range (mean = 44.3%, range = 28.9-57.8%) as Tremblay's high-intermediate level participants (mean = 40.1%, range = 31.1-48.9%).…”