Elicited Imitation (EI) is an assessment approach that uses sentence imitation tasks to gauge the oral proficiency level of test takers. EI tests have been created for several of the world's languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Mandarin. Little research has been conducted for using the EI approach with learners of Russian. This dissertation describes a multi-faceted study that was presented in two journal articles for the creation and analysis of a Russian EI test. The EI test was created for and tested with Russian-speaking missionaries and employees at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT. The first article describes the creation of the test and analyzes its ability to predict oral language proficiency by comparing individuals' scores on the EI to their scores on the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The test was found to effectively predict an individual's OPI score (R2 = .86). The second article analyzes the difference in person ability estimates and item difficulty measures between items from a general content bank and a religious content bank. The mean score for the content specific items (x̄ = .51) was significantly higher than the mean score for the general test (x̄ = .44, p < 0.001). Additionally, the item difficulties for the religious items were significantly less than the item difficulties for the general items (p < 0.05).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-5007 |
| Date | 17 March 2014 |
| Creators | Burdis, Jacob R. |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
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