Fairclough, M. (2011). Testing the lexical recognition task with Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States. Language Testing, 28(2), 273-297.
摘要:This investigation intends to assess the effectiveness of a lexical recognition test (Meara & Buxton, 1987) as a placement tool that distinguishes among levels of two groups of students: Spanish heritage language learners (HLL) and second language learners (SLL). Three hundred and thirty university students from four different levels completed a 10-minute/200-word task based on Davies' (2006) Spanish frequency corpora. The results were compared to those from a control group of bilingual graduate students. As comparison measures, about half of the students completed a Cloze Test while the rest were asked to carry out a Multiple-task Test. The results of the study suggest that for SLL, and HLL at the lower levels of language ability, a lexical test based on the 5000 most frequent words in Spanish is a valid and practical testing tool that correlates with other measures of language proficiency. For more advanced levels of HLL, a wider range of words is necessary to avoid the ceiling effect. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]
关键词:applied linguistics, language testing and assessment, applied linguistics, non-native language learning languages other than English, Word Recognition, Spanish as a Second Language Learning, Language Tests, College Students, Placement Tests, Heritage Language, Bilingualism