University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

An investigation of the reliability of L2 learners' grammaticality judgments

McCune, Eric Scott

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125907

Description

Title
An investigation of the reliability of L2 learners' grammaticality judgments
Author(s)
McCune, Eric Scott
Issue Date
1997
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Cowan, Ronayne
Department of Study
Linguistics
Discipline
Teaching English as a Second Language
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • Grammatical judgement
  • Relative clause structures
  • L2 learners
  • Sentence combining
Language
eng
Abstract
This thesis investigates the reliability of L2 learners' grammatical judgments of relative clause structures and how well their judgments support the construct validity of the Keenan & Comrie (19 77) accessibility hierarchy. The study was a replication with modifications of Gass (1994). The experiment employed a test-retest design with a one week interval between administration, using a computer administrated grammaticality judgment task and a written sentence combining task. Three proficiency groups, low, intermediate and high, took part in the experiment and were compared with a control group. Significant correlations were found across proficiency groups and on various sentence types. High correlations were found from one administration to _the other on both tasks, which support the reliability of L2 learners grammaticality judgments. The patterning of the data contrasted dramatically with Gass's results regarding the AH, indicating that this measure has little construct validity as a research tool.
Type of Resource
text
Handle URL
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125907
Copyright and License Information
Copyright owned by the author.

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