Abstract

Elicited imitation (EI) is a method of assessing oral proficiency in which the examinee listens to a prompt and attempts to repeat it back exactly as it was heard. Research over recent decades has successfully established correlation between EI testing and other oral proficiency tests, such as the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and the OPI by computer (OPIc). This paper details the history of oral proficiency assessment as well as that of EI. It then outlines the development process and validation of a Portuguese Elicited Imitation test. The processes of item selection and item validation are detailed followed by the criterion-related validation through a statistical correlation analysis of participants' results on an official American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) OPIc and their predicted OPIc scores which were based on their results of the Portuguese EI calibration test. Results of the statistical analysis revealed a strong correlation between the predicted scores of the EI test and the actual OPIc scores. In order to go beyond previously completed EI research, this paper addresses the issue of face validity which has been a challenge for the proliferation of EI testing. Analysis of a survey administered after participants' completion of the two tests (OPIc and EI) addresses the experiences and reactions of the participants to the two testing formats. Suggestions for future use of EI as well as future research will be presented.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Spanish and Portuguese

Rights

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