The Effect of Time Limits on Objective Measures of EFL Proficiency in Japanese Universlty Students

概要

論文の詳細を見る
This study mainly investigates the effect of differing time lilnits on the effectiveness (i.e. , the validity and discriminatory power) of objective measures of EFL proficiency in Japanese university students in an attelupt to find an appropriate EFL index of development. Two groups of Japanese EFL students wrote compositions under differing time limits. One group wrote for 20 minutes, and the other for 45 minutes. Ten objective measures related to T-unit analysis were used for data analysis. The major findings show that differing time limits had no significant effect on the efficacy of the measures. In other words, the validity and discriminatory power of these objective measures of EFL proficiency did not differ significantly between these two groups. However, regardless of proficiency level, differing tinue limits did affect the measures of fluency and syntactic conlplexlty- That is, students produced significantly longer compositions and nrore syntactically complex writing when greater tilue was available. In addltion, regardless of tilue limit, the measures except the total number of T-units, mean clause length and mean length of error-free T-units , increased I inearly with proficiency and discrimi nated significantly anlong all adjacent proficiency levels: high > uliddle > low.
社団法人大学英語教育学会の論文
1993-09-03