Calendrier
Série de conférences midi 2022-2023 (hiver 2023)
Conférence 3
Sara Saez-Fajardo
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The assessment of heritage language proficiency for research purposes: validating a measure for use with heritage speakers and second learners of Spanish.
Research in heritage language acquisition has increased in recent years, and more studies are comparing groups of heritage speakers (HS) and second language learners (L2ers). However, these groups have different acquisitional and learning profiles: HS tend to have stronger listening and speaking abilities and weaker literacy skills compared to L2ers, whose exposure to the language is generally exclusive to the classroom. Until now, assessment tools used on HS were commonly designed for L2ers, and they did not consider the inherent differences between the two groups. Therefore, there is a need for a convenient measure of proficiency that proves adequate to classify L2ers and HS into proficiency groups and meet investigation standards. In this ongoing project, a group of over 190 heritage and second language learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels have completed an elicited imitation task, together with other measures of proficiency (i.e., an oral narration task assessed with CAF measures, the Versant Proficiency Test, and two self-assessment tasks). Additionally, in another study, they have completed the DELE test (Montrul & Slabakova, 2003), one of the most utilized proficiency measures in Spanish HL and L2 acquisition research to date. From this comparison, we expect to obtain validity evidence for the use of the elicited imitation task, as well as to observe the functioning and correlation of the different measures that have been popularized in research settings.
- Le 15 février 2023
- 12h45 à 13h45
- En ligne
- Conférence en anglais