Measuring L2 Proficiency

Pascale Leclercq is a Lecturer in the English Studies Department of Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English as a Foreign Language, second language acquisition and L2 pedagogy to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and trains future language teachers.Amanda Edmonds is a Lecturer in French as a Foreign Language at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, France. She is currently director of the Master's program in French as a Foreign Language, and her teaching includes courses on FFL, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy.Heather Hilton is a Professor in the Language Department at the Université de Lyon 2, France. She has extensive experience of language teaching and now researches language acquisition and foreign language teaching methodology with a particular focus on young learners and learners with learning differences.

The eleven chapters contained in this volume have contributed greatly to the field of SLA as they provide a variety of answers to the question of how to assess L2 proficiency. The chapters are coherent in themselves as they provide a broad understanding of the concepts on the assessment of proficiency making a meaningful whole.

• Acknowledgements Preface 1. Pascale Leclercq and Amanda Edmonds: How to Assess L2 Proficiency? An Overview of Proficiency Assessment Research Part I: General Considerations for L2 Assessment 2. Heather Hilton: Oral Fluency and Spoken Proficiency: Considerations for Research and Testing 3. John Osborne: Multiple Assessments of Oral Proficiency: Evidence from a Collaborative Platform. 4. Marcus Callies, Maria Belén Díez-Bedmar and Ekaterina Zaytseva: Using Learner Corpora for Testing and Assessing L2 Proficiency. Part II Language Processing and L2 Proficiency 5. Peter Prince: Listening Comprehension: Processing Demands and Assessment Issues 6. Carrie A. Ankerstein: A Psycholinguistic Measurement of Second Language Proficiency: The Coefficient of Variance 7. Dominique Bairstow, Jean-Marc Lavaur, Jannika Laxen and Xavier Aparicio: Evaluating the Workings of Bilingual Memory with a Translation Recognition Task Part III Focused Assessment Instruments 8. Nicole Tracy-Ventura, Kevin McManus, Lourdes Ortega and John Norris: “Repeat as much as you can”: Elicited Imitation as a Measure of Oral Proficiency in L2 French 9. Kevin McManus, Nicole Tracy-Ventura, Rosamond Mitchell, Laurence Richard and Patricia Romero de Mills: Exploring the Acquisition of the French Subjunctive: Local Syntactic Context or Oral Proficiency? 10. Naouel Zoghlami: Testing L2 Listening Proficiency: Reviewing Standardized tests within a Competence-Based Framework. 11. Libby M. Gertken, Mark Amengual and David Birdsong: Assessing Language Dominance with the Bilingual Language Profile Epilogue