Guest lecture with Rosemary Erlam

Abstract 

In Ellis’s ‘Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language: A psychometric study’, published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition (2005), an Elicited Imitation test (Erlam, 2006) is included as a measure of implicit language knowledge. This presentation explores why Elicited Imitation might be a measure of implicit language knowledge, that is, give information about a learner’s internal language system. It also discusses the features that might be necessary to incorporate in the design of an elicited imitation test so that it does assess implicit language knowledge and not allow learners to just repeat verbatim what they hear. The presentation also reports on a study that investigated the importance of one design initiative, that is, the inclusion of belief statements to which test-takers had to respond. In a between-groups comparison, 103 participants completed one of two versions of this EI test, one which required participants to make a ‘belief’ judgement, and one which did not. Participants also completed other measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, and of global proficiency. Performance on each of the two EI versions was examined in relationship to performance on these other measures. There was no variation between performance on either EI test version. This finding underscores the need for ongoing research investigating the different possible design features of EI tests, such as the length of the time delay between the presentation of the stimulus and response.