The construct validation of self-ratings of communicative language ability

Bachman, Lyle F.; Palmer, Adrian S.

doi:10.1177/026553228900600104

Cited by 131 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…At the time of testing, 12 of them had studied French for at least 6 years (M = 8.9 years, SD = 1.97 years), had traveled extensively and/or lived in France and/or other French-speaking countries in Europe, and were studying French language and/or literature as their main subject in the university. They scored a mean of 2.83 (out of 4) (SD = 0.39) on the adapted version of a published scale for self-ratings of communicative ability in a second language (Bachman & Palmer, 1989). The other 12 subjects studied a variety of subjects other than French.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why is short-term sentence recall verbatim? An evaluation of the role of lexical priming

Lee

Williams

1997

Mem Cogn

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Byshowing that short-term sentence recall can be significantly affected by words encountered in an intervening distractor task, Potter and Lombardi (1990, Journal ofMemory and Language, 29, 633-654) argue that short-term sentence recall is often verbatim because of the availability of recently activated lexical entries during the regeneration of the sentence from its conceptual representation. We show that similar effects can be obtained even when bilinguals perform an intervening task in a different language from that of sentence recall, or when monolinguals perform an intervening task upon pictures. Furthermore, we show that the presentation of a word in P&L's distractor task does not, in any case, affect subsequent retrieval of a semantically related word as measured in a picture-naming task. We suggest that the effects on recall reported here and by P&Lshould be explained in terms of conceptual level interference at the time of recall. Wealso discuss the implications of our suggestion for the issue of the verbatimness of short-term sentence recall.Short-term sentence recall is traditionally regarded as involving a process of"reading off" the short-lasting representation(s) of the surface form of information ofa sentence-for example, the phonological, orthographic, auditory, or articulatory representations (see, e.g., Glanzer, Fischer, & Dorfman, 1984). Potter and Lombardi (1990; hereafter P&L) mount a challenge to this view and argue instead that like long-term sentence recall, short-term sentence recall involves a process of regenerating a sentence from its conceptual representation using the normal mechanisms of sentence production. They hypothesize that the accuracy and verbatimness ofshort-term recall compared with long-term recall is due to the fact that in the former case the regenerative process is aided by the added availability ofa set of unordered recently activated lexical entries in the mental lexicon (we shall refer to this as the lexical priming account). In the present article, we do not contest P&Vs view that short-term sentence recall involves a process of regeneration from the conceptual level (although we suspect that regeneration is probably not the The work reported on in this article was conducted while the first author was in receipt of an Overseas Research Student Award from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, a bursary from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, and a sponsorship from the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. We thank Stephen Monsell and Linda Wheeldon for supplying the computerized pictures used in Experiments 2 and 3 and the similarity ratings used in Experiment 3. We are also grateful to Mary C. Potter and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Correspondence should be sent to 1. N. Williams, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Keynes House, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lQA, England (e-mail: jnwI2@cus.cam....

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why is short-term sentence recall verbatim? An evaluation of the role of lexical priming

Lee

Williams

1997

Mem Cogn

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“…Based on the responses of the teacher informants, the Tunisian EFL learners are fully involved into the process of oral classroom assessment through the enactment of self assessment and peer assessment. For a number of researchers, the reliability of the learners' engagement within the assessment process can reach that of their tutors (Bachman & Palmer, 1989;Blanche, 1990).…”

Section: International Journal Of English Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Assessment of Speaking Skills at the Tertiary Level

Ounis¹

2017

IJEL

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Since "English has become the lingua franca for academic interaction of learners and academics" (Koo, 2009, p. 77), the development of the EFL learners' oral performance proficiency constitutes the central interest of current English language teaching methodologists and practitioners. The importance of speaking as a productive skill has been echoed in the literature. Indeed, it is viewed as a crucial "part of the curriculum in language teaching … and …an important object of assessment as well" (Luoma, 2004, p. 1). Thus, the prime aim of this study is to explore the prevailing conceptions and actual practices of the assessment of EFL learners' speaking skills at the tertiary level. The respondents of the current research were 20 instructors who taught at the Higher Institute of languages in Gabes and at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sfax, Tunisia. To collect the necessary data, a questionnaire survey was utilized. Then, the obtained data were analyzed using SPSS package. The findings revealed that the teachers' conceptions of assessment are directed towards the development of the learners' speaking skills. Despite the existence of a number of hardships, the teachers' classroom teaching practices revealed a compete reliance on authentic, ongoing, organized and thoughtful oral language assessment procedures which were meant to sustain and boost the learners' oral skill achievements.

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“…The more recent (Oscarson, 1989), comprehensive review suggests continued, marked diversity in the purposes, methods, and lines of inquiry subsumed under the" self-assessment" rubric (a theme which is reinforced by Oscarson's [forthcoming] review, based on examination of pre-publication copy, received too late for full consideration in this paper). For perspective regarding conceptual and methodological diversity see, for example, Ingram (1985), Bachman and Palmer (1989), Blanche and Merino (1989), Heilenman (1990), Xu (1991. For present purposes, it seems fair to say that in the field of second language proficiency assessment, interest in developing and evaluating formal self-assessment "instruments" has not been widespread, and very few studies appear to have employed the same or clearly similar instruments/models.…”

Section: Je Connais Presque La Totalite De La Grammaire Anglaise Maimentioning

confidence: 99%

Validity of Global Self‐ratings of Esl Speaking Proficiency Based on an Fsi/Ilr‐referenced Scale

Wilson¹

1999

ETS Research Report Series

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This study explored the validity and potential utility for self-assessment of speaking proficiency in English as a second language (ESL), of a self-rating scale intended to nominally parallel--in terms of number of points or levels and corresponding descriptions oflanguage-use behavior--a scale used by members of the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) to rate performance in Language Proficiency Interviews (LPI). The study sample was composed primarily of educated, adult ESL users/learners, most of whom were native-speakers of either French or German, who provided self-assessments just prior to taking the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), in employment-related ESL training contexts in Switzerland. Correlations between self-ratings and TOEIC scores centered around .7, and the mean ILRreferenced self-rating was very close to that for "predicted ILR-scaled LPI rating", where prediction was based on a previously developed equation for predicting LPI rating from TOEIC score. Lines of inquiry warranting further research are suggested.

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The construct validation of self-ratings of communicative language ability

Cited by 131 publications

References 5 publications

Why is short-term sentence recall verbatim? An evaluation of the role of lexical priming

Why is short-term sentence recall verbatim? An evaluation of the role of lexical priming

The Assessment of Speaking Skills at the Tertiary Level

Validity of Global Self‐ratings of Esl Speaking Proficiency Based on an Fsi/Ilr‐referenced Scale

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