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SLA Elicitation Tasks

  • Chapter
The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology

Abstract

This chapter deals with two common elicitation procedures in second language acquisition (judgment tasks and elicited imitation). The chapter begins with a discussion of the uses and misuses of judgment data. The major focus is on the practicalities involved in collecting acceptability/grammaticality judgment data, although mention is also made of other types of judgment data (e.g., truth-value judgments) and an alternative to judgment data, namely, magnitude estimation. This section is followed by looking at elicited imitation. The chapter then addresses earlier controversies in using these data and elucidates best practices.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use the term second to refer to language learning beyond the first. Thus, the term “second” or L2 is used as a heuristic for nonprimary language acquisition (i.e., third, fourth, etc.).

  2. 2.

    For an excellent online database of tasks, please see IRIS, a digital repository of data collection instruments for research into second language learning and teaching. This is a free resource of elicitation instruments that have appeared in “peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and books” (Marsden, Mackey, & Plonsky 2016, p. 6; www.iris-database.org).

  3. 3.

    Gass (1979) compared production data with judgment data, coming to different conclusions when analyzing each alone. Through an analysis of both judgment data and written production data, she was able to determine instances of avoidance which reflected the particular construct under investigation (Accessibility Hierarchy).

  4. 4.

    Technically, they are best referred to as acceptability judgments. A grammar is an abstraction and one cannot access that abstraction directly. What one does is ask about the acceptability of a particular sentence and then make inferences about the abstract grammar that underlies that judgment. In this chapter, I refer to them as grammaticality judgments given that this is the most commonly used term in the literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. English Language Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Susan Gass

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  1. Susan Gass
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Correspondence to Susan Gass .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Aek Phakiti

  2. Department of Linguistics, Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Peter De Costa

  3. Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Luke Plonsky

  4. School of Education, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Sue Starfield

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Gass, S. (2018). SLA Elicitation Tasks. In: Phakiti, A., De Costa, P., Plonsky, L., Starfield, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_15

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