Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
- Chapter 1 The nature of language proficiency
- Chapter 2 Constructing measures and measuring constructs
- Chapter 3 Communicative competence revisited
- Chapter 4 Response by DBP project members to the discussion papers of Lyle Bachman and Jacquelyn Schachter
- II CLASSROOM TREATMENT
- III SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL VARIABLES
- IV PRACTICAL AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
- V THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH ON BILINGUALISM
- CONCLUSION
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Chapter 2 - Constructing measures and measuring constructs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
- Chapter 1 The nature of language proficiency
- Chapter 2 Constructing measures and measuring constructs
- Chapter 3 Communicative competence revisited
- Chapter 4 Response by DBP project members to the discussion papers of Lyle Bachman and Jacquelyn Schachter
- II CLASSROOM TREATMENT
- III SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL VARIABLES
- IV PRACTICAL AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
- V THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH ON BILINGUALISM
- CONCLUSION
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
One of the primary areas of research in the Development of Bilingual Proficiency (DBP) project was the investigation of the nature of language proficiency, which was the focus of a large-scale study conducted during the first two years of the project. This question was also examined in studies of lexical proficiency and metaphor comprehension conducted during the later years of the project. While the results of these and some of the other studies conducted as part of the project have implications regarding the nature of language proficiency, this discussion will center on the large-scale study.
This study quite appropriately took the form of construct validation, in which both the hypothesized constructs of language proficiency and putative measures of those constructs were subjected to empirical scrutiny in what is essentially a special case of theory verification (or falsification). The process of collecting evidence in support of the construct validity of test score interpretations and hence of the constructs themselves is perhaps as complex as the very constructs it examines; its logic, on the other hand, is quite simple:
Define theoretical constructs and hypothesize relationships among them
Define these constructs operationally (as measures or as observable characteristics)
Make predictions about how performance on these measures should or should not be functionally related, or how the performance of different groups of individuals should or should not be different
Observe performance
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- The Development of Second Language Proficiency , pp. 26 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
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