Erwin Tschirner

The Rating of Direct and Semi-Direct Oral Proficiency Interviews: Comparing Performance at Lower Proficiency Levels.

As states and universities institute oral proficiency requirements with vast numbers of students to be tested, there is a need to investigate effective alternatives to the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) that allow group testing. This article reports on a study comparing student performances and test reliabilities for the German Speaking Test (GST) developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, a semi-direct tape-mediated oral proficiency test, and the ACTFL OPI. Both the GST and a German OPI were administered as final oral exams to a randomly selected group of 20 students (out of a total of 59 students) enrolled in a fourth-semester German course at a large Midwestern university. The OPI levels of the students tested ranged from Novice High (n= 5) and Intermediate Low (n= 9) to Intermediate Mid (n= 6). At these 3 levels, final ratings on the GST and the OPI agreed with each other perfectly in 90% of the cases. There were only 2 one-step disagreements, both involving students who were rated Novice High on the ACTFL OPI, but who received other ratings on the GST. Although the results indicated a high score equivalency between ACTFL proficiency ratings obtained on both tests, this study underscores the pressing need for double ratings and arbitration procedures in high stakes testing situations.

The Role of Orthotactic Probability in Incidental and Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition L1 and L2.

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas low orthographic probability contributed positively to incidental acquisition of novel word meanings in first language (L1), high orthographic probability affected positively the second language (L2) intentional learning. The results are discussed in the context of the following concepts: (1) triggering the establishment of a new representation, (2) noticing of new lexemes during reading, and (3) vocabulary size of the L1 and L2 mental lexicons.

Semantic Representation of Newly Learned L2 Words and Their Integration in the L2 Lexicon.

The present semantic priming study explores the integration of newly learnt L2 German words into the L2 semantic network of German advanced learners. It provides additional evidence in support of earlier findings reporting semantic inhibition effects for emergent representations. An inhibitory mechanism is proposed that temporarily decreases the resting levels of the representations with which the new representation is linked and thus enables its selection despite its low resting level.

INCIDENTAL ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL FEATURES DURING READING IN L1 AND L2

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the incidental acquisition of grammatical knowledge (experiments on subcategorization), except when the new knowledge interferes with previously acquired knowledge and mechanisms (experiments on [ir]regularity): Although both populations performed equally well regarding the acquisition of the subcategorization of verbs from the input (i.e., whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive), they differed with respect to the regularity status of new verbs. L1 speakers (in contrast to L2 learners) seem to disprefer irregularly conjugated verb forms in general, irrespective of their conjugation in the previous input. The results further show that the syntactic complexity of the context and morphological markedness positively affect the incidental acquisition of new words in the L2, triggering learners’ shift of attention from the text level to the word level.

Incidental acquisition of new words during reading in L2: Inference of meaning and its integration in the L2 mental lexicon – ERRATUM

A novel combination of several experimental and non-experimental paradigms was applied to explore initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) during reading in German as a second language (L2). The results show that syntactic complexity of the context positively affects incidental acquisition of new words, triggering the learners shift of attention from the text level to the word level. A subsequent semantic priming task revealed that the new words establish associations with semantically related representations in the L2 mental lexicon after just three previous occurrences and without any consolidation period. The semantic inhibition effect for the new words (contrary to semantic facilitation for known L2 words), however, indicates that the memory traces of the new semantic representation are still very weak and that their retrieval is probably hindered by stronger semantically related representations that have much lower activation thresholds and higher potential for being selected.