ABSTRACT
The study of language knowledge either involves understanding learners’ comprehension skills or production skills, or both (depending on the research focus). In this chapter, the attention is on learners’ production of language and how different tasks can (or importantly in some cases, cannot) tap into various aspects of learners’ underlying linguistic, sociolinguistic and/or pragmatic competence. The chapter will begin with a general discussion of comparisons between standardized assessments which tap into learners’ linguistic productive skills and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using these against more bespoke measures – or measures that are used widely in various sub-fields of applied linguistics but are nonetheless not standardized assessments. The discussion turns then to a more focused review of issues and challenges associated with measures aimed to elicit linguistic utterances from learners along the continuum of control (i.e., ranging from pure naturalistic observation (no control) to specific tasks which aim to elicit very focused and specific linguistic forms). The chapter concludes with recommendations concerning how data from language elicitation tasks might best be conceived within applied linguistics research.
