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Project Details:
Principal Investigators on this project:
Long, Mike
Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency
Project Objective: To improve the teaching, learning, and testing of high-level listening and speaking abilities in critical foreign languages.
Project Definition: Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency (LCPs) are detailed inventories of language features and abilities - sounds, vocabulary, grammar, dialects, and registers - typically mastered by, or still posing problems for English-speaking learners of critical foreign languages. This typically occurs at advanced proficiency levels, i.e., 2, 3 and 4, on the ILR scale.
Project Importance: Teachers, testers, and learners themselves need to know precisely what is required for students to advance from a level 2 to 3, or 3 to 4.
Project Background: Advanced speakers of languages which are critical for national security are in high demand but in short supply. There is an urgent need to develop new speakers and to raise the ability levels of existing talent pools. This cross-linguistic work maximizes generalizability to new languages. It leverages the latest linguistic analyses and is anchored in research findings on second language acquisition.
Project Products: - Empirically based, annotated check-lists of problematic language items at each level
- Diagnostic tests with which to identify the abilities and residual linguistic difficulties for individual students of each language needing to advance to the next level.
Project Reports: Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency: Rationale, Methodology, and Content
Project Activities: - FY 06: Perform cross-linguistic analyses of higher level skills in Arabic, Korean, Persian, and Russian
- FY 07: Develop and trial a battery of listening and speaking diagnostic tests
- FY 08: Revise, retrial, and analyze results to finalize diagnostic tests
- Create checklists of the linguistic correlates of proficiency levels
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