Proficiency and complexity in Spanish as a second language

Assessing students' language proficiency can be crucial to gauge a program's effectiveness in reaching stated goals. However, proficiency ratings by themselves are not enough to inform programs about the linguistic development of their students and to help instructors make evidence-based pedagogical decisions to help students make progress through the proficiency continuum. In this talk we describe the process followed to analyze specific linguistic features of the spoken production of learners of Spanish rated as Advanced and Intermediate on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency scale. Using data collected as part of a large proficiency assessment project, the authors extracted and transcribed excerpts of computer-based Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIc). The samples were compiled into a corpus that was then analyzed to assess the level of syntactic complexity and lexical diversity demonstrated by learners as they produced oral narrations. The corpus consists of narrations produced by 20 learners: 10 at the Advanced level, and 10 at the Intermediate level. In addition, similar narrations produced by 5 native speakers were included in the corpus for comparison purposes. The learners represent all the sublevels of proficiency within the ACTFL Intermediate level (CEFR A2-B1) and Advanced level (CEFR B2-C1). Using a concordance program (AntConc) and a program to analyze transcription data (CLAN), we looked at both holistic and register measures of linguistic complexity as well as lexical diversity, and examined which measures best correlate with different proficiency levels. In addition to contributing to the discussion on linguistic correlates of proficiency in Spanish as a Second Language, the results of the study have crucial implications for classroom teaching as they provide empirical evidence to align instruction with proficiency-based standards.