Doing interlanguage analysis in school contexts

In second language acquisition (SLA) research it is well-known that interlanguages are autonomous and rule-governed linguistic systems whose grammar cannot be described simply in terms of errors and deviations from L2 norms. However, assessment practices at school, both formative and summative, heavily rely on counting errors and scoring them based on various types of ‘gravity’. Carrying out a systematic interlanguage analysis as it is done in SLA research would be highly time consuming and very impractical in most teaching and testing contexts. The chapter will show some examples of interlanguage analysis in such contexts. Different stages of the research process will be focussed upon, including data collection, transcription, coding, scoring, and quantitative and qualitative analysis. If CEFR scales are to be related to acquisitional sequences in teaching and testing contexts, it is necessary to find ways in which the latter can be assessed in a reasonable amount of time and without specialized skills, while preserving the procedure’s validity with the respect to current SLA theorising and methodology.