Please contact José Alemán Bañón for the passcode to Zoom.

To the Zoominar

In recent years, leading Second Language Acquisition (SLA) journals have recognised the need to improve scientific rigor in order for our research community to produce more reliable and replicable findings. An important step in this direction concerns the validity of instruments used for data collection. Inadequate testing tools risk undermining knowledge production, which in the long run may have negative consequences also outside the field of SLA when research findings are picked up by decision-makers and translated into practice, for example, in education.

In my presentation, I will discuss validity issues in research on how individual differences in language learning aptitude influence SLA outcomes. The LLAMA language aptitude tests have featured in over 50 published empirical studies that involve language aptitude in one way or another. The findings in these studies help to shape our perceptions of what language aptitude is and its possible effects on L2 learning. In my research, a model for the validation of psychological and educational testing tools was used to analyse the performance of the LLAMA tests. Results suggest that the initial version of the LLAMA, as introduced by Meara (2005), may have yielded inconsistent outcomes, thereby casting doubt on the robustness of conclusions drawn in associated research. However, recent work has been undertaken to improve the psychometric quality of the LLAMA tests and I will present some preliminary and promising, findings from ongoing validation of the latest version of the test.

Lars Bokander

About the Higher seminar in Research on Bilingualism