An investigation of the reliability of L2 learners' grammaticality judgments

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Teaching English as a Second Language

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

1997

Author dc:creator

• McCune, Eric Scott

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cowan, Ronayne

• Grammatical judgement
• Relative clause structures
• L2 learners
• Sentence combining

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright owned by the author.

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/125907