Relaties Tussen VT-Grammaticaliteitsoordelen en VT-Productie

Teacher training institutes in the Netherlands submit to their students tests of grammaticality judgments concerning FL senten-ces, in order to prepare them for their future task. Comparison of the results of these tests with results of FL production tests of the same students suggested that the former task was more difficult that the latter. The aim of this study was to examine two questions: (1) Is the production of FL grammatical structures different from, that is, more difficult than giving a judgment of grammatical acceptability concerning the same structures? (2) How do students proceed when judging the grammaticality of a given FL sentence? Existing studies on FL grammaticality judgments do not give a clear-cut onswer to these questions. Therefore we decided to carry out an experimental study, concentrating on the characteristics of grammaticality judgment tasks. 30 French syntactic structures were selected which often give rise to errors. These structures were incorporated in a grammaticality judgment test and a production test. The tests were administerd to matched groups of Dutch students of French. The hypothesis was that the two tasks were of a different degree of difficulty. The results did not confirm this hypothesis: although differences were found between the three conditions explored (judgment of a correct sentence, of an incorrect one, and production), these differences were not significant. The grammaticality judgment test was also administered to two groups of French subjects in order to compare their behaviour to that of the Dutch group. The French subjects were found to behave more homogeneously than the Dutch ones. Finally, the grammaticality judgment test was administered to a small group of Dutch subjects in a thinking-aloud-setting. The results of the pilot study suggest that the two tasks are not essentially different. This can be explained in the framework of the literature discussed. An article reporting this study will appear in ITL Review of Applied Linguistics (1986 or 1987)