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摘要：This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to become well versed in terms of the linguistic characteristics of expert and novice speakers' usage and identify the test construct. In regard to developing and validating language tests, large representative corpora, learner corpora, and specialized corpora have been actively used, as these corpora have made it possible to systematically compare the linguistic features associated with expert users with those found in learner language. Recent advances in computational approaches to assessment can facilitate this comparison to a great extent using technologies in automated essay scoring and learner language analysis. As an emerging area in the field of language assessment, corpus-based research should extend to less explored areas including compilation and longitudinal analysis of developmental corpora, fine-grained microanalysis of learner's development, and assessment attuned to individual learners who use different linguistic varieties. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In this study I examine the construct of aptitude in learning Chinese as a second language (L2) to an advanced level. I test 2 hypotheses: first, that L2 aptitude comprises 4 components -- working memory, rote memory, grammatical sensitivity, and phonemic coding ability -- and second, that L2 aptitude affects learning both directly and indirectly (mediated by strategy use and motivation). Native speakers of English (n = 96) studying advanced Chinese took the Modern Language Aptitude Test and a phonological working memory test and responded to motivation and strategy use questionnaires. Using end-of-course listening, reading, and speaking proficiency test results as measures of Chinese learning, I constructed a structural equation model to test the hypotheses. The model fit the observed data. Of the 4 components foreseen to comprise L2 aptitude, rote memory contributed the most and working memory the least. Aptitude, strategy use, and motivation had about the same impact on learning but varied in how well they predicted the individual skills of listening, reading, and speaking. The results shed light on L2 aptitude in the particular context of an advanced L2 Chinese course.

摘要：This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these questions, 63 Spanish monolinguals and 69 beginning and 64 intermediate Anglophone late learners of L2 Spanish completed a moving-window and a grammaticality judgment task with sentences with gender concord and discord with animate and inanimate nouns. The moving-window data reveal longer reading times in sentences with gender discord than concord and in those with animate than inanimate nouns in intermediates and Spanish monolinguals but not in beginners. Similarly, grammaticality judgments show that intermediates are more accurate in sentences with inanimate than animate nouns and are better than beginners in sentences with gender agreement violations. These results suggest that intermediate learners display targetlike patterns that are more qualitatively similar to those of natives than beginners, both in terms of semantic and grammatical features. In addition, these findings indicate that agreement with animate nouns is cognitively more demanding than with inanimate nouns both for intermediates and Spanish monolinguals, in line with lexical and syntactic accounts of gender.

摘要：This longitudinal study investigates the development of writing proficiency in English as a foreign language (EFL), in contrast to the development of first language (L1) writing proficiency in Dutch L1, in a sample of almost 400 secondary school students in the Netherlands. Students performed several writing tasks in both languages in three consecutive years. Furthermore, data were collected about students' metacognitive and linguistic knowledge (grammar, vocabulary, and spelling) and their fluency in lexical retrieval and sentence building (reaction times). Analyses, using structural equation modeling, show that EFL writing was more strongly correlated to linguistic knowledge and linguistic fluency than L1 writing was and that, over the course of the two years investigated, students' EFL writing proficiency improved to a greater extent than did their L1 writing proficiency. Furthermore, through the modeling of L1 and EFL writing proficiency, a strong relation between the two constructs could be established, with metacognitive knowledge and general fluency mediating this relation. This finding is paralleled by the study of Van Gelderen, Schoonen, Stoel, De Glopper, and Hulstijn (2007) showing a strong relationship between L1 and EFL reading proficiency. Taken together, the findings of these studies call for the inclusion of the constructs of L1 proficiency, linguistic fluency (speed of processing of lexical and grammatical information), and language-general metacognition in theories of the acquisition of L2 proficiency.

摘要：This study examines the roles of proficiency and working memory (WM) capacity in second-/foreign-language (L2) learners' processing of agreement morphology. It investigates the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical short- and long-distance number agreement dependencies by native English speakers at two proficiencies in French, and the relationship between their proficiency and WM capacity in French and their sensitivity to agreement violations. Native English speakers at mid- and high proficiencies in French and native French speakers completed an acceptability judgment task, a self-paced reading task, and a WM task in French, and the English speakers also completed a WM task in English. The results showed that whereas all participants performed at ceiling on the acceptability judgment tasks, only the high-level L2 learners and native speakers showed some sensitivity to number agreement violations. For L2 learners, this sensitivity did not vary as a function of the length of the agreement dependency. The results also indicated that L2 learners tended to be more sensitive to agreement violations as their WM memory capacity in French increased. The implications of these results for theories of L2 morphological processing are discussed.

摘要：This study investigates task-related variation in learner performance in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. For our study, we collected data from 15 beginner and then intermediate second language (L2) learners of German who worked on 3 distinct activity types over 16 months: free composition, translation, and sentence building. Study results reveal that grammatical accuracy with respect to German word order was significantly higher with the meaning-focused task type (i.e., free composition) for both the beginner and intermediate levels. Moreover, proficiency level also had a significant effect on L2 word order accuracy: Beginner students performed significantly better than intermediate learners on the two form-focused task types (i.e., translation and sentence building). With the ultimate goal of understanding learner performance as it relates to different task types and success in CALL, this article provides possible explanations of these study results and suggests areas for future development of task design in CALL. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study explored the developed and acquired critical competence of a group of American learners of French as a second language (L2), intermediate level, within a virtual learning environment (VLE). In this VLE, students had to resolve complex problems in a collaborative way. The study focused on the concept of negotiation and co-construction of meaning as a paradigmatic phenomenon of emerging critical competence for learners of a foreign language. It first aimed to evaluate the nature of discourse schemas produced by these learners when chatting in the VLE in order to find out what these schemas indicated about the quality of the critical competence of these learners. Furthermore, this study wanted to explore the learners' perception of the impact of their immersion within the VLE on the development of their critical competence in French in order to better inform the way VLEs should be used in foreign language courses. This study was based on a mixed methods research protocol that favoured the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative data in order to increase the results' validity and credibility. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales -- for example, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) -- shortcomings of existing scales (e.g., vague descriptors) reflect limited empirical evidence as to which linguistic aspects influence listeners' judgments of L2 comprehensibility at different ability levels. To address this gap, a mixed-methods approach was used in the present study to gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic aspects underlying listeners' L2 comprehensibility ratings. First, speech samples of 40 native French learners of English were analyzed using 19 quantitative speech measures, including segmental, suprasegmental, fluency, lexical, grammatical, and discourse-level variables. These measures were then correlated with 60 native English listeners' scalar judgments of the speakers' comprehensibility. Next, three English as a second language (ESL) teachers provided introspective reports on the linguistic aspects of speech that they attended to when judging L2 comprehensibility. Following data triangulation, five speech measures were identified that clearly distinguished between L2 learners at different comprehensibility levels. Lexical richness and fluency measures differentiated between low-level learners; grammatical and discourse-level measures differentiated between high-level learners; and word stress errors discriminated between learners of all levels. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Research has consistently shown there is a negative correlation between age of onset (AO) of acquisition and ultimate attainment (UA) of either pronunciation or grammar in a second language (L2). A few studies have indeed reported nativelike behavior in some postpuberty learners with respect to either phonetics/phonology or morphosyntax, a result that has sometimes been taken as evidence against the critical period hypothesis (CPH). However, in the few studies that have employed a wide range of linguistic tests and tasks, adult learners have not exhibited nativelike L2 proficiency across the board of measures, which, according to some, suggests that the hypothesis still holds. The present study investigated the relationship between AO and UA and the incidence of nativelikeness when measures of phonetic and grammatical intuition are combined. An additional aim was to investigate whether children and adults develop the L2 through fundamentally different brain mechanisms -- namely, whether children acquire the language (more) implicitly as an interdependent whole, whereas adults learn it (more) explicitly as independent parts of a whole. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Within the field of SLA, the incidence of nativelikeness in second language (L2) speakers has typically been explained as a function of age of acquisition. An alternative interpretation, however, is that L2 learners do not attain nativelike proficiency because of first language (L1) maintenance. This interpretation has nevertheless remained mostly theoretical due to the lack of empirical evidence. This study sets out to address the role of L1 proficiency in L2 ultimate attainment by examining L1 and L2 proficiency in 30 early L1 Spanish-L2 Swedish bilinguals. Language proficiency was assessed through grammaticality judgment tests and cloze tests, and additional data on language aptitude were collected through the Swansea Language Aptitude Test (v.2.0; Meara, Milton, & Lorenzo-Dus, 2002). The results showed positive correlations between nativelike L1 and L2 behavior. Additionally, it was found that language aptitude was positively correlated with nativelike L1 and L2 performance. In view of these findings, it is suggested that (a) L1 maintenance does not hamper L2 nativelikeness and (b) language aptitude is an important factor for bilingual ultimate attainment. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, which features six articles from the High-Level Proficiency in Second Language Use research program at Stockholm University, is introduced.

摘要：This study explores how second language (L2) texts written by learners at various proficiency levels can be classified using computational indices that characterize lexical competence. For this study, 100 writing samples taken from 100 L2 learners were analyzed using lexical indices reported by the computational tool Coh-Metrix. The L2 writing samples were categorized into beginning, intermediate, and advanced groupings based on the TOEFL and ACT ESL Compass scores of the writer. A discriminant function analysis was used to predict the level categorization of the texts using lexical indices related to breadth of lexical knowledge (word frequency, lexical diversity), depth of lexical knowledge (hypernymy, polysemy, semantic co-referentiality, and word meaningfulness), and access to core lexical items (word concreteness, familiarity, and imagability). The strongest predictors of an individual's proficiency level were word imagability, word frequency, lexical diversity, and word familiarity. In total, the indices correctly classified 70% of the texts based on proficiency level in both a training and a test set. The authors argue for the applicability of a statistical model as a method to investigate lexical competence across language levels, as a method to assess L2 lexical development, and as a method to classify L2 proficiency. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：This study examines the associations between the speaking proficiency of 181 adult learners of Dutch as a second language and their linguistic competences. Performance in eight speaking tasks was rated on a scale of communicative adequacy. After extrapolation of these ratings to the Overall Oral Production scale of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001), 80 and 30 participants (on average per speaking task) were found to be, respectively, at the B1 and B2 levels of this scale. The following linguistic competences were tapped with non-communicative tasks: productive vocabulary knowledge, productive knowledge of grammar, speed of lexical retrieval, speed of articulation, speed of sentence building, and pronunciation skills. Discriminant analyses showed that all linguistic competences, except speed of articulation, discriminated participants at the two levels of oral production. Subsequent comparisons showed that the distance between B1ers and B2ers was smaller in knowledge of high-frequency words than in knowledge of medium- and low-frequency words. Extrapolation from scores on the vocabulary test yielded estimations of productive vocabularies of, on average, 4000 and 7000 words for B1ers and B2ers, respectively. The grammar test assessed grammatical knowledge in 10 domains. B2ers were found to outperform B1ers on all parts of the test. Thus, the differences in lexical and grammatical knowledge of B1ers and B2ers appear to be a matter of degree, rather than a matter of category or domain. The paper ends with a research agenda for a linguistic underpinning of the CEFR. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy values, polysemy values, semantic co-referentiality, word meaningfulness, word concreteness, word imagability, and word familiarity. Human raters evaluated a corpus of 240 written texts using a standardized rubric of lexical proficiency. To ensure a variety of text levels, the corpus comprised 60 texts each from beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language (L2) adult English learners. The L2 texts were collected longitudinally from 10 English learners. In addition, 60 texts from native English speakers were collected. The holistic scores from the trained human raters were then correlated to a variety of lexical indices. The researchers found that lexical diversity, word hypernymy values and content word frequency explain 44% of the variance of the human evaluations of lexical proficiency in the examined writing samples. The findings represent an important step in the development of a model of lexical proficiency that incorporates both vocabulary size and depth of lexical knowledge features. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on ESL/EFL teachers' evaluation and interpretation of oral English proficiency as elicited by the national College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) of China. Informed by debates on the issue of native speaker (NS) norms which have become the focus of attention in recent years, this study addresses the question of whether judgments of language proficiency by non-native English speaking (NNES) teachers, who are currently used to assess performance on the CET-SET, correspond to those of native English speaking (NES) teachers or whether the two groups draw on different constructs of oral proficiency. Data for the study were derived from two sources: unguided holistic ratings given by a group of 19 NES and 20 NNES teachers to CET-SET speech samples from 30 test-takers, and written comments to justify the ratings assigned. Results yielded by both quantitative (MFRM) and qualitative analyses of teacher data, revealed no significant difference in raters' holistic judgments of the speech samples and a broad level of agreement between groups on the construct components of oral English proficiency. However, the analysis of raters' comments revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in the way NES and NNES teachers weighed various features of the oral proficiency construct in justifying the decisions made. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the study's findings for debates about the native speaker norm as the target for language learners and test-takers. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：Patterns of students' language learning were examined through an asynchronous cross-cultural bilingual communication project conducted between Japanese university students learning English and Canadian university students learning Japanese. Previous studies on cross-cultural communication projects have reported positive outcomes in providing learners with opportunities for cultural and language learning. However, very few, if any, investigated whether a meaning-focused communication project like ours provides similar opportunities for language learning, and if so, what kind of language learning takes place. With focus on Canadian students' learning of Japanese, the present study addressed these questions through analyses of students' logs and message texts. The results indicated that students have opportunities for all aspects of language learning, including vocabulary, kanji, grammar, and phrase/sentential expressions. However, it was also found that the amount and type of incidental learning may depend on the students' proficiency level. Explicit corrections are noticed but often not understood unless clear explanations are given. We suggest these kinds of communication projects might further promote incidental learning opportunities by better understanding the proficiency levels of the other's second language, as well as by more and better incorporation of clear error corrections possibly accompanied by metalinguistic explanations. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Recent studies illustrate the potential that intercultural telecollaborative exchanges entail for language development through the use of corrective feedback from collaborating partners (Kessler, 2009; Lee, 2008; Sauro, 2009; Ware & O'Dowd, 2008). We build on this growing body of research by presenting the findings of a three-month-long research project that explored the impact of peer feedback on the development of learner accuracy. Our aim was to study participants' attention to form and the relative effectiveness of error correction strategies. In order to do so, we organised an e-mail exchange between seventeen post-secondary learners of Spanish and German. Data consist of exchanges between the five dyads who completed the full three-month project. As suggested by Vinagre and Lera (2008), analysis of these data indicate that despite frequent use of error correction, the use of remediation led to a higher percentage of errors recycled and was more conducive to error recycling in later language production. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Variability in achievement across learners is a hallmark of second language (L2) learning, especially in academic-based learning. The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), based on a large, population-representative sample in the United Kingdom, provides the first opportunity to examine individual differences in second language achievement in a longitudinal and genetically sensitive design, and to relate these differences to variability in first language achievement. Teacher National Curriculum ratings for Modern Foreign Language achievement at age 14 for 1632 twin pairs (611 monozygotic, 1021 dizygotic) constituted the core measure. Measures of socioeconomic status, early (ages 2-4) first language achievement (L1), and adolescent (age 12) L1 and reading significantly predicted L2 achievement. However, both individually and collectively they accounted for only a small proportion of the variance of L2 across the entire distribution. Twin analyses revealed that 42% of the variance of L2 was due to genetic variance, and about a third to shared environmental factors (shared within a family). Structural equation modeling confirmed that although there were genetic and environmental factors that influenced both L1 and L2 achievement (genetic correlations between L2 and other measures ranged from .33 to .51, and shared environment correlations ranged from .15 to 1.00), most of the genetic influence on L2 was independent of genetic influence on L1. Thus, the genetic factors that contribute to individual differences in L2 learning are largely distinct from those influencing L1. Additional analyses showed that the balance of genetic and environmental factors was very similar for the low achieving and high achieving students (lowest and highest 10%, respectively), and was similar to that for the full distribution. This pattern of results suggests that variability in L2 achievement is a continuous variable across the entire range, rather than reflecting qualitative or categorical differences at the extremes, and that it is largely the same genes which influence variability within the normal range and at the extremes. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Introduces a special journal issue on the subject. The authors discuss the practical and theoretical reasons for studying variability in immersion and proficiency in second languages.

摘要：As is the case in traditional second language (L2) acquisition research, a major question in the field of L2 real-time sentence processing is the extent to which L2 learners process the input like native speakers. Where differences are observed, the underlying causes could be the influence of the learner's first language and/or differences (fundamental or not) in the use of processing strategies between learners and native speakers. Another factor that may account for L1-L2 differences, perhaps in combination with others, is individual variability in general levels of proficiency or in learners' general cognitive capacities, such as working memory and processing speed. However, systematic research into the effects of such individual differences on L2 real-time sentence processing has yet to be done because researchers in the main attempt to control for individual differences in general cognitive capacities rather than to investigate them in their own right: nevertheless, a review of the current work on L2 sentence and discourse processing raises some interesting findings. An overview of this research is presented in this paper, highlighting what appear to be the circumstances under which individual differences in factors such as working memory capacity and proficiency do or do not affect L2 sentence processing. Taken together, the data suggest that it is only under certain experimental circumstances-specifically, when participants are asked to perform a metalinguistic task directing their attention to the manipulation at the same time as comprehending the input-that individual differences in such factors as insufficient L2 proficiency and/or cognitive processing limitations, like speed and working memory influence L2 learners' real-time processing of the target input. Under these circumstances, L2 learners of for instance, a higher working memory capacity or greater proficiency are more likely to process the input like native speakers. Otherwise, learners appear to shallow process the input, irrespective of individual variability. Adapted from the source document