Research Forum: A Study of Beginning ESL Students' Performance in Interview Tests

Researchers into first language acquisition, naturalistic second
language acquisition and instructed second language acquisi
tion have sought to describe their subjects' chronological development,
and have employed a variety of measures of language
development. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982, p. 215) list eight such
measures. Larsen-Freeman (1978, p. 440) bemoans the absence of a
single, universal measure applicable to the acquisition of all second
languages, while Brown (1973, p. 55) suggests that a single index
may be insufficient. In the absence of a single, recognized measure
of second language development, four potential areas of development
are examined in the present study of instructed second language
acquisition. Length of turn is an index of grammatical
development (Brown, 1973, p. 53), expressed in terms of the mean
number of morphemes per turn over a given sample of subjects'
speech, a turn being defined as what is said by anyone person
before or after another person speaks.