Testing Sociolinguistic Competence

Shardakova, Maria

doi:10.4324/9781003017325-8

Cited by 1 publication

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“…However, these authors show that even this is not good enough because even skills are context dependent: there’s no “speaking in general” but speaking in this kind of context, that other kind of context, and so on. From this it follows that proficiency tests are necessarily limited: skills are grounded in particular activities, and any given test can only simulate a limited range of activities ( Shardakova, 2022 ).…”

Section: What Is “Bilingualism” Such That It May Be Cognitively Advan...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once we start thinking of proficiency in terms of activity-grounded skills, it follows that no one is equally proficient as anyone else because no one participates in exactly all and only the same activities as others. In debates surrounding language instruction and testing research, as Shardakova (2022) explains, the view of “proficiency as a single trait (…) was rejected on the grounds of its methodological flaws in the use of statistical analyses and empirical evidence in favor of a complex multifaceted nature of communicative proficiency” (p. 86). Full proficiency is not a single thing, and even so-called “monolinguals” do not possess the linguistic abilities needed to engage equally successfully in all of the activities that exist in the society that they live in.…”

Section: What Is “Bilingualism” Such That It May Be Cognitively Advan...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means

Oliveira

2022

Front. Psychol.

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For decades now a research question has firmly established itself as a staple of psychological and neuroscientific investigations on language, namely the question of whether and how bilingualism is cognitively beneficial, detrimental or neutral. As more and more studies appear every year, it seems as though the research question itself is firmly grounded and can be answered if only we use the right experimental manipulations and subject the data to the right analysis methods and interpretive lens. In this paper we propose that, rather than merely improving prior methods in the pursuit of evidence in one direction or another, we would do well to carefully consider whether the research question itself is as firmly grounded as it might appear to be. We identify two bodies of research that suggest the research question to be highly problematic. In particular, drawing from work in sociolinguistics and in embodied cognitive science, we argue that the research question of whether bilingualism is cognitively advantageous or not is based on problematic assumptions about language and cognition. Once these assumptions are addressed head on, a straightforward answer to the question arises, but the question itself comes to seem to be a poor starting point for research. After examining why this is so, we conclude by exploring some implications for future research.

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Section: What Is “Bilingualism” Such That It May Be Cognitively Advan...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Is “Bilingualism” Such That It May Be Cognitively Advan...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means

Oliveira

2022

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Testing Sociolinguistic Competence

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means

Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means

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