Metalinguistic Test Research Articles

Explicit and implicit knowledge of English tenses of primary school EFL learners in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The linguistic knowledge of foreign language learners appears to be partly implicit and partly explicit. Learners rely on implicit knowledge when involved in spontaneous everyday com- munication, while explicit knowledge enables them to reflect on language structures and reco- gnise or use metalanguage. The present study investigated the explicit and implicit foreign language learners’ knowledge of English tenses in the Bosnian context at the end of the first educational cycle, i.e., primary school, by means of a metalinguistic test, an untimed gram- maticality judgement test and an elicited imitation test. The study aimed at exploring the var- iability in the quantity and quality of EFL learners’ knowledge and the relationship between different types of knowledge based on three factors, namely gender, average grade, and start- ing age. While revealing quite limited knowledge of the target structures, the findings showed no significant difference between explicit and implicit knowledge, while the correlation co- efficients between them were relatively high. Out of the three factors, a three-way ANOVA showed that only average grade proved to have a significant main effect on EFL knowledge. The interaction effect of gender and grade was significant on the participants’ overall EFL knowledge and their explicit knowledge, whereas a significant interaction effect of all three factors was confirmed only on explicit knowledge.

The importance of increased processing demands in the design of Elicited Imitation tests

This study is a conceptual replication of Ellis’ ‘Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language: A psychometric study’, published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition (2005), aiming to establish the importance of including belief statements (hypothesized to increase processing demands) in the design of Elicited Imitation (EI) tests. In a between-groups comparison, 103 participants completed one of two versions of Erlam’s EI test (2006), one which required participants to make a ‘belief’ judgement, and one which did not. Both contained ungrammatical stimuli. Participants were scored for repetition of grammatical stimuli and correction of ungrammatical stimuli. An Exit questionnaire aimed to establish how aware they were of ungrammatical stimuli. Participants also completed a timed grammaticality judgement test (TGJT), an untimed grammaticality judgement test (UGJT), a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT), and another Elicited Imitation (EI) test designed as a measure of global proficiency. Performance on each EI version was examined in relationship to performance on these measures. There was no variation between performance on either EI test version. The article underscores the need for ongoing research investigating design features of EI tests.

Language-Related Skills in Bilingual Children With Specific Learning Disorders

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the characteristics of the language-related skills of bilingual children with specific learning disorders (SLD). The aim is achieved by analyzing language-related skills in a sample of bilingual (Italian plus another language) and Italian monolingual children, with and without SLD.Patients and methods: A total of 72 minors aged between 9 and 11 were recruited and divided into four groups: 18 Italian monolingual children with SLD, 18 bilingual children with SLD, 18 Italian monolingual children without SLD, and 18 bilingual children without SLD. Each child underwent tests to evaluate different aspects of language skills: lexical and grammar, metalanguage and executive functions.Results: With regard to lexical and grammatical skills, the conditions of SLD and bilingualism both impact naming in terms of total number of errors for words with low frequency of use, while the condition of SLD has an effect on semantic errors for words with low frequency of use. The condition of bilingualism impacts on the total errors for words with high frequency of use and on circumlocution-type errors for words with low frequency of use. There were significant effects of bilingualism and SLD on the metalinguistic test for understanding implicit meaning, and an impact of SLD on phonological awareness was also found.Conclusion: The results suggest that both SLD and bilingualism have an effect on some lexical skills, in particular for words with low frequency of use. Both conditions, bilingualism and SLD, seem to impact on metalinguistic abilities that depend on lexical knowledge. These findings reinforce the importance of improving understanding of the neuropsychological profile of bilingual children with SLD.

Phonology and orthography in deaf readers: Evidence from a lateralized ambiguity resolution paradigm

ABSTRACT This study explored differences between the two hemispheres in processing written words among deaf readers. The main hypothesis was that impoverished phonological abilities of deaf readers may lead to atypical patterns of hemispheric involvement. To test this, deaf participants completed a metalinguistic awareness test to evaluate their orthographic and phonological awareness. Additionally, they were asked to read biased or neutral target sentences ending with an ambiguous homograph, with each sentence followed by the request to make a rapid lexical decision on a target word presented either to the left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH). Targets were either related to the more frequent, dominant, meaning of the homograph, to the less frequent, subordinate, meaning of the homograph or were not related at all. An Inverse Efficiency Score based on both response latency and accuracy was calculated and revealed that deaf readers’ RH perform better than their LH. In contrast to hearing readers who in previous studies manifested left hemisphere dominance when completed the same research design. The apparent divergence of deaf readers’ hemisphere lateralization from that of hearing counterparts seems to validate previous findings suggesting greater reliance on RH involvement among deaf individuals during visual word recognition.

Performance profile of reading and metalinguistic skills in students with dyslexia, learning difficulties and learning disorders

Introduction: The reading process involves several cognitive skills, such as metalinguistic skills and memory. These processes lead the student to understand the ideas of a text for the creation of mental models, based on the context and your point of view. Objective: To analyze the performance of metalinguistic and reading skills in students with dyslexia, learning difficulties, and learning disorders. Methods: This is an observational and cross-sectional study. The group comprised 80 students from the 3rd to the 5th year of elementary, both gender, aged between eight and ten years and 11 months. The sample, distributed in four groups as follows: Group I composed of 20 students with an interdisciplinary diagnosis of dyslexia, Group II make up of 20 students with a multidisciplinary diagnosis of learning disorders, Group III by 20 students with learning difficulties and Group IV comprised 20 students with excellent academic performance. Every student, individually, underwent the application of the Metalinguistic and Reading Skills Tests Protocol. Results: The Groups I and II had more errors than Group III and IV. Group III showed a higher number of mistakes than Group IV. Scores were obtained from the metalinguistic tests, word reading and pseudowords, and repetition of no -monosyllable and polysyllable words. Conclusion: Students with dyslexia and learning disorders had a higher number of mistakes in syllabic and phonemic tests, reading words, and pseudowords than students with learning difficulties and excellent academic performance.

Washback effects of multiple-choice, cloze and metalinguistic tests on EFL students writing

The washback effects of different test formats on the writing performance of students have always been of great importance. However, this area of research has not fully touched upon by researchers of second language testing. Despite the importance of the issue, there is a dearth of empirical studies to unravel the effects of different types of tests on learning. To shed some light on the current issue, the present study intends to look into the washback effects of tests on students who are learning and using some special grammatical points in writing tasks. In order to fulfil this project, we made a set question in three formats of cloze, multiple-choice and metalinguistic on a grammatical form(i.e. present perfect and present perfect continuous)to use after each session of teaching (2 sessions of training) as an activity. The researchers devised and validated three tests on the target form; each test contained 20 questions and was in different formats of cloze, multiple-choice or metalinguistic. At the end of this two-session trainings, two focused writing tasks were implemented. The results indicated that supporting teaching grammatical points with metalinguistic tests yields the highest positive washback on students writing. Finally, some practical implications were suggested.

La conciencia fonológica: análisis en niños de educación inicial de instituciones peruanas según su estructura familiar

Recibido: 12 de enero del 2019Aprobado: 01 de abril del 2019El presente estudio pretende determinar la diferencia existente a nivel de conciencia fonológica según la estructura familiar que presentan niños de nivel básico de instituciones peruanas. El estudio corresponde a un diseño no experimental descriptivo comparativo. La muestra fue determinada según criterio no probabilístico intencional, estuvo conformada por 200 estudiantes con edades entre 4, 5 y 6 años de educación inicial, de ambos sexos. La conciencia fonológica fue evaluada a través del Test de Habilidades Metalingüísticas (THM). Los resultados ofrecen evidencia que existen diferencias significativas en las habilidades metalingüísticas: segmentación silábica y detección de rimas en los niños de diferentes estructuras familiares. En género, las niñas obtuvieron una diferencia favorable frente a los niños varones. Además, se evidenció diferencia a favor de los niños provenientes de instituciones privadas. Por último, se evidenció diferencias significativas favorables en niños cinco y seis años de edad.

Assessing the effect of focused direct and focused indirect written corrective feedback on explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners

This study investigates the effect of teacher’s written corrective feedback (WCF) on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by language learners. Eighty-seven Iranian beginner learners of English participated in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to three groups: focused direct WCF, focused indirect WCF, and control groups. The participants completed text summary tasks. They also took placement test, pretest narrative writing task, text summary tasks, pretest and posttest untimed grammaticality judgment test, metalinguistic test, and timed grammaticality judgment test. The results of the data analysis showed the positive effect of WCF on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by Iranian beginner learners of English in an English as a foreign language classroom context. However, the findings of the study should be interpreted cautiously due to different factors involved in explicit and implicit acquisition of a structure and also the nature of a structure and its difficulty and complexity. The findings of the study are discussed in detail and future venues for research are suggested.

Interactions between type of form-focused instruction, type of morphosyntactic form, and type of language knowledge

AbstractAlthough claims about the nature of EFL/ESL learners’ knowledge (i. e., implicit and/or explicit) are essential to many debates in foreign/second language development, few studies have sought to evaluate the effects of linguistic and/or contextual variables on the two knowledge types. This study, accordingly, undertook to examine the effects of different explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four easy and difficult forms as assessed by different implicit and explicit outcome measures. The instruments utilized to assess students’ learning were: oral elicited imitation, untimed and timed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were administered to 150 novice learners immediately after FFI and again after a 4-week delay. Immediate and durable effects of FFI were found for the easy and difficult target forms on both implicit and explicit knowledge measures. Specifically, the study indicated that explicit and implicit types of FFI were significantly more beneficial for explicitly-easy and implicitly-easy language forms respectively. The findings of this study may contribute a different set of insights to our understanding of the efficacy of varying types of FFI on learners’ controlled and/or spontaneous use of easy and difficult structures at early stages of L2 development.

Condições primordiais e secundárias para produção de testes metalinguísticos em L2

Os testes metalinguísticos têm sido usados por muitos pesquisadores como um meio eficaz de fornecer dados sobre a natureza da linguagem. Bley-Vroman, Felix e Ioup (1988), Hawkins e Chan (1997), Johnson e Newport (1989), Schachter (1989), Schütze (1996), White (2003), entre outros, utilizaram esses testes para dar suporte a suas hipóteses sobre a aquisição e o desenvolvimento de uma segunda língua (L2). Para este artigo, foram analisadas três pesquisas, com a finalidade de criar condições relevantes para aqueles pesquisadores que necessitam construir testes metalinguísticos (TM) para validar suas investigações. Além disso, avaliamos testes utilizados na área de Aquisição de Segunda Língua (ASL), com o intuito de verificar se as condições aqui apresentadas foram atendidas. Percebemos, porém, que os testes metalinguísticos utilizados por esses autores poderiam ter sido construídos com mais cautela para que tivessem maior confiabilidade e uma melhor validação dos resultados.

Comparison of performance in metalinguistic tasks among students with and without risk of dyslexia

Introduction: Studies on students at risk for dyslexia have increased as well as the interest in verifying whether tasks involving a phonological basis can favor the performance of these students in the initial literacy process.Objective:Evaluate the performance of students with and without risk of dyslexia in metalinguistic tasks.Methods: Participants of this study were 40 students, aged between 5-6 years, enrolled in the 1st year of elementary school, divided into two groups, GI: composed of 20 students without risk of dyslexia and GII: composed of 20 students at risk of dyslexia, both groups were submitted to the Evaluation Cognitive Linguistic Skills Protocol - collective and individual version (adapted), and phonological intervention composed of tasks of relation letter/sound alphabet in sequence and in random order, rhyme, identification and manipulation of words, identification and production of syllables, syllabic segmentation and analysis, identification and phonemic segmentation, substitution, synthesis, analysis and phonemic discrimination. Results: Indicated that the students from GI and GII showed statistically superior performance in the post testing compared to the performance obtained in the pre testing.Conclusion: The students at risk of dyslexia showed an increase in the mean of performance after the intervention, however, when compared with the performance of the students without risk for dyslexia, they presented inferior performance, indicating that, even after have underwent to the intervention, they did not reach the mean of performance of students without risk for dyslexia in metalinguistic tests.

The Metalinguistic and Linguistic Knowledge Tests and Their Relationship between Non-native In-service and Pre-service Teachers

Fairly recently, the construct of metalinguistic knowledge and its relation to L2 learners’ language proficiency have been the focus of numerous theoreticians, researchers, and the educators in the field. With respect to second language teachers assessment, however, little attempt has been made to explore the metalinguistic knowledge and its relationship between serving and non-serving teachers. The current study, accordingly, was designed to investigate whether there is a relationship between non-native in-service and pre-service teachers performing the metalinguistic and linguistic knowledge tests and if there is a difference between the two groups of teachers’ performance on these two tests. To collect the data on the two constructs of linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge, 80 non-native teachers performed on the Cloze Test and untimed Grammaticality Judgment Test from an English language institute. Following a range of statistical analyses, the findings revealed no positive correlation between the Linguistic and Metalinguistic tests both in the in-service and pre-service teachers of English language. It was also found that the two groups of teachers did not differ significantly with respect to their performance on the Linguistic test while the in-service teachers outperformed their counterpart in the Metalinguistic knowledge test.

Développement métalinguistique chez de jeunes enfants bilingues comparés à des monolingues

Nous présentons deux études sur le développement métalinguistique d’enfants bilingues, les uns italien–anglais, les autres italien–français, avec un même test métalinguistique en plusieurs versions linguistiques. La première étude, menée dans des classes de maternelles et primaires à Londres, a impliqué 118 enfants de quatre et cinq ans, dont 64 bilingues simultanés italien–anglais, et 54 monolingues anglais, tous issus d’un milieu socioculturel favorisé. Les bilingues ont obtenu des résultats métalinguistiques significativement supérieurs aux monolingues, indépendamment de la version linguistique du test (italienne ou anglaise). La deuxième étude a impliqué 101 enfants de cinq ans, dont 47 bilingues italien–français (31 simultanés et 16 consécutifs) fréquentant une école française à Rome, et 54 monolingues, dont 27 étaient des monolingues italiens testés à Rome en version italienne et 27 des monolingues français, testés en version française à Paris. Comme dans la première étude, tous les enfants appartenaient à un milieu favorisé. Les résultats ont montré que les bilingues ont eu de meilleurs résultats que les monolingues indépendamment de la version du test et de la distinction entre simultanés et consécutifs.

The Study of the Metalinguistic Knowledge of English by Students in an Intensive and a Traditional Course

The goal of the current research was to study the relationship among learning contexts and, levels of metalinguistic knowledge of the Iranian intermediate EFL learners. This research explores the level of learners’metalinguistic knowledge in English in two different contexts (traditional and intensive courses). Participants included 44 intermediate students at Shoukoh Language Institute, Zanjan, Iran. The selection violated the randomization criterion, thus the quasi-experimental was taken for the current study. The instruments used for data collection were Nelson English Language Proficiency Test (NELPT) as a placement test which used to measure level of students prior to the experiment and, a metalinguistic knowledge English test (MKET) was also, administered at the beginning and ending the semester as pre and post-test to measure their metalinguistic knowledge. The data collected from the administration of the above mentioned two tests were submitted to different statistical analysis such as ANCOVA, one independent sample t-test and, one paired sample t-test. The results revealed that there was a significant distinction between two sets performance in the metalinguistic test. An intensive English course had an important helpful influence on MKE of the students. They enhanced their MKE in an intensive semester. As an implication of this study, the findings will motivate language teachers to focus on intensive semester because intensive instruction was found to be effective in improving the EFL learners’ MKE. Further study is needed before the results of the research can be generalized.

The impact of translation on L2 learners’ metalinguistic competence

This paper investigates the effect of translation courses and language proficiency on learners’ metalinguistic knowledge at Isfahan University, Iran. Tests of Metalinguistic knowledge, language proficiency and a background questionnaire were administered to learners of translation fields of study (as the experimental group) and the control group of English literature learners at Isfahan University, Iran. Each of translation and literature groups were further ranked into 4 groups by their language proficiency. It was found that learners’ metalinguistic ability and their language proficiency are not correlated. Multivariate analyses indicated that both groups did not show any awareness of certain properties of language as MLK. However, it was shown that Translation learners were better at language analytic section of the metalinguistic test. It is suggested that translation courses can increase the learners’ language analytic ability. The importance and the theoretical implications of the results are also counted for language teaching and testing.

Investigating the Relatedness of Five Different Operationalizations of Explicit Knowledge of English Morphosyntax: A Levels of Processing Approach

This study aimed to investigate the relatedness of five different operationalizations of explicit knowledge of English morphosyntax within the framework of levels of processing. Two groups of university students, majoring in English translation at BA level, participated in the study. For the purpose of the study, five different operationalizations of the explicit knowledge of English morphosyntax were drawn from the literature and two metalinguistic knowledge tests were constructed. The two measures were piloted; the one with 52 items showed strong overall internal consistency (α=0.98) and the other one with 30 items showed an acceptable overall internal consistency (α=.70). The data analyses using Pearson correlation revealed that there is no high correlation between the five variables, and therefore no serious covariation problem was detected. Moreover, the results of repeated-measures ANOVA showed that there was a significant within-group difference between the performances of each group on the metalinguistic test. The results of the study are discussed within the level of processing (LoP) framework and implications are offered.

The Babylonian benefit: Neurological research shows that being bilingual enhances mental performance and may protect from Alzheimer's disease.

The Babylonian benefit: Neurological research shows that being bilingual enhances mental performance and may protect from Alzheimer's disease.

Recast or Prompt: Which One Does the Trick?

The purpose of the present study was to explore if providing recast and prompt would have different effects on the grammatical development of Iranian learners of English. In other words, the study investigated the effect of corrective feedback on learners’ grammatical achievement. After administering a proficiency test, forty-five participants out of sixty were selected from the intact classes at a language institute in Ahwaz. These forty-five participants were randomly assigned to three groups namely, prompt, recast and no-feedback group or and control group each comprising of fifteen participants. Picture description tasks, referred as focused tasks (Ellis, 2012) were used as treatment. Two pen-and-paper tests were used as data collection tool. One was a grammatical judgment test and the other was a metalinguistic knowledge test. Data analysis through one-way ANOVA and Tukey test revealed significant differences between recast and prompt groups (p<.05). The results also showed that though both recast and prompt enhance the grammatical development of the learners, learners in prompt group achieved more than those in both recast and control groups. The results would benefit those teachers dealing with grammar instruction and error correction techniques. Moreover, teacher educators can use the findings of this study in their teacher education courses for pre-service or in-service teachers.

Relación entre las habilidades metalinguisticas y la memoria en niños de primer y segundo grado de primaria de Lima Metropolitana

La investigación tuvo como objetivo establecer si existía o no relación entre las habilidades metalinguisticas y la memoria en estudiantes de primer y segundo grado de primaria de Lima Metropolitana. Se evaluó a 164 niños de primer y segundo grado de primaria, de ambos sexos, cuyas edades fluctuaban entre los 6 y 7 años de edad, a quienes se aplicó el Test de Habilidades Metalinguisticas propuesta por Gómez,J. Valero, R. Buades,A. y Pérez. y adaptado a nuestra realidad por Panca (2000) y el Sub Test de memoria de digitos de la Escala de Wecshler para niños (WISC III). Los resultados mostraron que existe correlación entre las habilidades metalinguisticas y la memoria de los niños. Se halló correlación positiva entre segmentación silábica, supresión silábica, detección de rimas, unir fonemas y contar fonemas con la retención de dígitos en orden progresivo, y correlación negativa entre la adición silábica y retención de dígitos en orden progresivo. También se halló correlaciones positivas entre la segmentación silábica, supresión silábica, aislar fonemas, unir fonemas y contar fonemas con la retención de dígitos en orden inverso. Se encontraron diferencias en las habilidades metalingüísticas y en la retención de dígitos en orden progresivo e inverso, según el grado de estudio.

Metalinguistic knowledge, metalingual knowledge, and proficiency in L2 Spanish

The role of metalinguistic knowledge of language and knowledge of technical terms (i.e. metalingual knowledge) in second language (L2) learning and use is a matter of controversy in the field of Second Language Acquisition. This paper examines the development of these two types of knowledge in adult university-level learners of L2 Spanish, and their relationship to L2 proficiency. Metalinguistic and metalingual knowledge were measured using a metalinguistic knowledge test containing 16 sentences with an underlined error about a particular grammatical structure. The participants were asked to provide a written description of the rule that the error was violating. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data shows that, in general, learners demonstrated limited metalinguistic and metalingual knowledge. In addition, there was great variation regarding how close the learners’ verbalisations resembled pedagogical rules of the structures tested. Furthermore, the participants used very few technical terms, albeit mostly correctly, compared with the metalanguage found in those pedagogical rules. Finally, the results show that metalinguistic and metalingual knowledge correlated with written measures of L2 proficiency but not with oral proficiency. These results are discussed in light of previous research, and implications for future research are offered.