Russian is a Less Commonly Studied language and one of the languages the study of which U.S. National Security Education program considers critical to U.S. national security and economic stability. The study of Russian receives support as one division of foreign language, area, and international studies infrastructure-building at U.S. colleges and universities.
The goal of this project is to generate and norm a proficiency assessment tool for the adult non-native (L2 and Heritage) speakers of Russian. We have built a cloze test that gauges the knowledge of a variety of lexical and grammar aspects of Russian that are commonly addressed in the Russian courses curricular. The norming process involves a detailed analysis of the testing tool validity and correlating the results of the pilot testing with independent measures of vocabulary and speech proficiency obtained from the same individuals.
Data for this project were collected nation-wide, with two largest respondents pools located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the Russian Language Program & REEEC) and the University of Indiana (UI Summer Language Workshop).
As of now, cloze-based proficiency tests are broadly used to assess skills and grammar knowledge in other languages, such as Spanish or French. Rather few normed tests of Russian proficiency are available (e.g., TORFL, ACTFL). Mostly, these tests have to be taken at specialized testing centers or require specially trained individuals to score the results. The testing tool that we offer is less resource-intensive, incorporates authentic materials, and taps into a range of grammatical/lexical and cultural knowledge that is taught in the second/foreign language courses of Russian. It will aid teachers and researchers of Russian to economically and reliably assess the proficiency level of entering/continuing students.
Project Status
Data collection completed in September 2014. Data analysis in progress.
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