In addition to setting, the issue of naturalness arises with regard to the type of data the researcher collects. As we have seen, one of the features which varies along the qualitative/
quantitative continuum is whether or not any instrumentation is used. In theory, researchers who embrace more qualitative methodologies would reject the use of instruments to elicit data, favouring instead spontaneous or 'natural' data. It follows that in theory researchers preferring quantitative methods would choose to use instruments in their studies. In practice, however, as we have seen earlier, no such clear-cut distinction exists.
While it might be desirable to study only subjects' spontaneous production, as was mentioned earlier, the mere presence of an observer is likely to cause the subjects to pay more attention to their speech and thus result in unspontaneous performance. Moreover, even if completely spontaneous production data were available, there are certain
drawbacks to relying solely on them for insights into the SLA process. First of all, without the imposition of constraints in terms of the range of possible responses a subject is likely to produce, it is impossible to study all aspects of a learner's developing performance. Certain language features could not be studied because they do not occur frequently in normal conversation. A researcher would have to wait a long time, for example, for subjects to produce enough gerundive complements for the researcher to be able to say anything meaningful about their acquisition.
Second, learners will place limitations on the data themselves (Corder 1981). Learners will often not reveal to researchers their entire linguistic repertoire; rather, they will use only those aspects in which they have the most confidence. They will avoid the troublesome aspects through circumlocution or some other device. And it may be precisely the troublesome aspects of the second language in which the researcher is most interested. Thus, if the occasion does not lend itself for a particular aspect of linguistic performance to be manifest, or if learners are adept at circumlocuting aspects of the language which cause them difficulty, researchers will not be able to adduce any sort of evidence.
Finally, if a researcher were limited to describing what arose spontaneously for a given subject, comparison from study to study would be
difficult and generalizations about second language learners would be seriously delayed until a sufficiently large volume of data was amassed.
Une 01 the primary functions, then, ot instruments designed to elicit production data is to oblige learners to produce the
item the investigator is interested in studying. At the same time, since researchers still want to strive to obtain as natural a performance as possible, it is ideal if the subjects remain unaware of the item under investigation. There are other desirable qualities that one would want to take into account in designing such an instrument, such as the presence of a context, scoring ease, length, sample, ordering effects, ease of administration, etc., but we will be unable to deal with these here. (See Larsen-Freeman 1985b for a discussion of these and other qualities.)
When instruments are used to collect linguistic production data, they are referred to by a variety of names: elicitation procedure, elicitation device, technique for eliciting performance data, data-collection or data-gathering device, a task or even a test, although we will submit later that there is an important distinction between the last two. The purpose of the following is to describe a number, although by no means all, of the elicitation procedures employed in SLA research today. We will present them in a rough order from those that exert more control over the learners' performance to those that exert less control, although admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to order contiguous procedures based on this criterion alone. We will also cite some representative studies in which the elicitation procedure has been appropriated.
(1) Reading aloud. This procedure has been used in studies researching pronunciation in a second language (Beebe 1980b; Flege 1980). Subjects are asked to read aloud word lists, sentences or passages which have an abundance of particular sounds in representative environments. The subjects' performance is recorded for later analysis.
(2) Structured exercises. Subjects are asked to perform some grammatical manipulation so that researchers can study subjects' performance with regard to specific morphemes or syntactic patterns. Some exercise types which have been utilized are transformation exercises (Cazden et al. 1975), fill-in-the-blanks with the correct form (Larsen-Freeman 1975a), sentence-rewrite (Schmidt and McCreary 1977), sentence-combining (Schmidt 1980) and multiple choice (Bialystok 1982).
(3) Completion task. In one form of this task, subjects listen to or read the beginning of a sentence and are asked to complete it using their
own words. Richards (1980) used this procedure to study infinitival and gerundive complements. He gave each subject the start of a sentence including a verb which could take either complement. The subjects were asked to complete the sentence.
Bialystok (1982) had subjects complete a text. Subjects were asked to read a written dialogue and a brief summary statement. The subjects were then asked to complete the dialogue. The task was fashioned so that subjects were required to use one of the six target forms, i.e. forms Bialystok was interested in studying.
Using another completion task of sorts, Natalicio and Natalicio (1971) employed the Berko 'wug' test of first language acquisition fame in their study of Spanish children's acquisition of English. Berko (1958) gave a child a nonsense word - e.g. 'wug' - and then showed the child a picture of 'a wug.' Next the child was shown a picture of two wugs and told: 'This is a picture of...' If the child completed the sentence
successfully, the researcher determined that the child had the ability to extend morphological rules to new cases. The child had to be using rules, since nonsense plurals, such as 'wugs,' could not have been heard in the input. The Second Language Oral Production English or SLOPE Test (Fathman 1975a) is an SLA completion task, patterned very much like the Berko morphology test.
(4) Elicited imitation. The usual elicited imitation procedure is to have the researcher read to the subject a particular set of sentences containing examples of the structure under study (or better, play a taped reading since it standardizes such aspects as rate of delivery). The subject is asked to imitate each sentence after it is read. The procedure is based on the assumption that if the sentence is long enough (Naiman 1974 suggests fifteen syllables), a subject's short-term memory will be taxed and consequently the subject will be unable to repeat the sentence by rote. What the subject will have to do, instead, is to understand the sentence and to reconstruct it using his or her own grammar. Although there is some controversy regarding variability in performance (see Gallimore and Tharp 1981 for discussion), for the most part comparable performances between elicited imitation and spontaneous production have been reported.
(5) Elicited translation. Ravem (1968) was one of the first researchers to use translation as an elicited procedure, but the procedure was discussed at greatest length by Swain, Naiman and Dumas (1974). Subjects are given a sentence in their native language and are asked
to translate it into their second language or vice versa. It is thought that such a procedure requires both the decoding of
that subjects' performance approximates natural speech production.
(6) Guided composition. Subjects produce oral or written composition in response to some set of organized stimuli.
Richards (1980) used picture sequences which tell a story as stimuli. Ioup (1984a) asked subjects to write a composition based on an arrangement of content words she gave them.
(7) Question and answer (with stimulus). Conducting a question-and-answer session (with stimuli) is a fairly common means of eliciting SLA data. Researchers using the Bilingual Syntax Measure (Burt, Dulay and Hernandez-Chavez 1975) follow this procedure. Subjects look at a picture or a series of pictures and answer questions designed to elicit particular structures under study. Bialystok (1982) had her subjects listen to sixteen personalized situations which are described in a few sentences and which end with a question. Subjects then were asked to give a contextually appropriate response.
(8) Reconstruction. This procedure has also been called 'story retelling' by Hulstijn and Hulstijn (1984) and 'paraphrase recall' by Connor and McCagg (1983). Subjects read or listen to a story (Larsen-Freeman 1983a) or watch a movie (Godfrey 1980). They are then asked to retell or reconstruct the story orally or in writing.
(9) Communication games. Scarcella and Higa (1981) used a procedure which could aptly be classified as a communication game. Native English speakers were paired with both child and adolescent ESL learners. Each pair was asked to use pieces of plastic to replicate a picture they had been given.
Their conversations were audiotaped and transcribed. The transcriptions were analysed for the native-speaker input received by the ESL learners of different ages and the negotiation the learners performed to manage the input.
Lightbown, Spada and Wallace (1980) also availed themselves of a procedure which fits this category. Each subject was given ten sets of cards. Each set consisted of four pictures which differed from each other minimally. The subject was asked to choose one of the four and to describe it to the researcher so the researcher would know which picture the subject had selected. The pictures were specifically
designed to provide contexts in which the structures under study would be likely to occur.
(10) Role play. Fraser, Rintell and Walters (1980) proffer role play as a useful means to study learners' pragmatic competence. So many contextual features (e.g. status of speaker and listener, urgency of the message, relationship between speaker and listener, their sexes, their ages, etc.) are important in determining how a speaker will behave. In a role play, the speech act can be kept constant while the contextual features are varied. In this way, many dimensions of a learner's pragmatic competence may be explored. In Fraser, Rintell and Walters' procedure, the subjects were asked to participate in a more or less structured role play with the researcher. Other researchers have used role plays with puppets when the subjects have been children (Walters 1979).
(11) Oral interview. Researchers vary in the way they use oral interviews as an elicitation procedure. Some exercise control over the topics with the hope that they can steer the conversation in such a way that subjects will be encouraged to
produce the structure being studied. Other researchers, while acknowledging that an oral interview is constrained in certain ways, allow subjects freedom in choosing what topics should be discussed. In so doing, it is hoped that subjects will tend to become involved in the subject matter of the conversation and consequendy produce more spontaneous speech (Johnston 1985).
(12) Free composition. Perhaps the least controlled of all elicitation procedures is the free composition. Aside from the establishment of a topic, there is no intervention by the researcher. Of course, a topic itself can encourage the production of certain structures as opposed to others. For instance, if it is the case that the researcher is studying something as ubiquitous as grammatical morphemes (Andersen 1976), then specifying that the writer has to relate some past experience gives the researcher ample data with which to study the acquisition of how the subject expresses past time, although it does not guarantee that subjects will do so using pasttense morphemes. (See, for example, Dittmar 1981.)