This document describes and compares different types of linguistic tests used to measure language ability, including naturalistic production tasks, elicited production tasks, comprehension tasks that explicitly or implicitly measure knowledge, and online tasks. It outlines what each task measures, what linguistic areas they study, and pros and cons of each approach.

1. Linguistic tests
Workshop 2

2. Types of Tasks
 Naturalisticproduction tasks.
 Elicited Production Tasks
 Comprehension Tasks: Explicit Measures
 Comprehension Tasks: Implicit Measures
 Online Tasks

3. NATURALISTIC PRODUCTION
TASKS
 Naturalistic speech
 Naturalistic writing

4. WHAT THEY MEASURE
Production (oral or written)
Performance (don’t tap into
competence very much)
Primarily implicit knowledge

5. WHAT THEY STUDY
Lexical knowledge
Inflectional morphology (use of
past tense morphology)
Basic syntax (word order)
In classroom research

6. Pros
Easy to conduct
Closest way to measuring
language as it is actually used.

7. Cons
 Time-consuming (create and
analyze transcripts)
 No control over production for the
experimenter
 Low proficiency L2 learners may be
reluctant to produce anything
 Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.

8. ELICITED PRODUCTION TASKS
Eliciting entire speech/writing
samples
Eliciting individual
words/phrases

9. WHAT THEY MEASURE
Production (oral or written)
Performance (tap into
competence)
More explicit knowledge than
the naturalistic tasks

10. WHAT THEY STUDY
Lexical knowledge
Inflectional morphology (have
to supply the right form of a
verb)
Semantics of closed-class
words (use of the vs. a)
In classroom research

11. Pros
More control over type of
production than with
naturalistic production
Can target specific
words/phrases

12. Cons
Still
a lot of transcribing
May be testing explicit rather
than implicit knowledge (with
word/phrase elicitation)
Not appropriate for use with
children or low literacy adults
(most experimenter controlled
type of elicitation is written)

13. COMPREHENSION TASKS:
EXPLICIT MEASURES
Grammaticality Judgements
Acceptability Judgements
Preference Judgements
Sentence Conjunction
Judgements

14. What they measure
Comprehension
Performance (tapping directly
into competence)
Very explicit knowledge

15. What they study
 Complex sentence structure (that
are not often used spontaneously)
 Inflectional morphology
 Semantic appropriateness (whether
one grammatical sentence is
appropriate in the context of
another)

16. Pros
 Cantest just about any kind of
grammatical construction.
 Straightforward:
testing exactly
what we want to know.
 Easy to analyze the data.

17. Cons
Tests highly explicit knowledge
L2 learners are often unsure
about their judgements
Inappropriate for use with
children and low literacy adults
(written format)

18. COMPREHENSION TASKS:
IMPLICIT MEASURES
Truth-value judgement tasks
Picture-matching/ picture -
selection tasks

19. What they measure
Comprehension
Performance (tapping directly
into competence)
Implicit knowledge

20. What they study
Interpretation of pronouns and
reflexives
Aspectual interpretation
Generic vs. Specific
interpretation

21. Pros
No focus on grammar – test of
implicit knowledge
Appropriate for children and
low literacy adults – use of
pictures na doral stories

22. Cons
Can only be used for linguistic
knowledge at the syntax-
semantics interface –
constrained application
Tests are time consuming and
difficult to construct
Have to control for many
factors

23. Online Tasks
Self-pased reading /
listening

24. What they measure
processing
performance with implications
for competence
implicit knowledge – subject
does not know what is being
tested

25. What they study
Whether some sentence types
are more difficult to process
then others (active vs.
passive, subject questions vs.
object questions)
How speakers process
ambiguous

26. Pros
Test implicit knowledge
Get data about language use
in real time

27. Cons
More costly and time
consuming than offline tasks
Highly constrained application
The connection from
reaction/reading times to
conclusions about language
relies on certain assumptions