The development of tasks for measuring morphological awareness and word-meaning inference in L2 Russian

Abstract

Despite extensive research on L2 reading subskills, majority of these studies focus on L2 English and L2 Chinese, which means that most instruments on reading subskills are also available for L2 English and L2 Chinese. To address the needs of L2 reading researchers who work with other languages, often with fewer L2 learners, this paper documents the steps taken in the development of tasks for measuring morphological awareness and word-meaning inference in L2 Russian. The paper aims to contribute to the discussion on task development for research in less commonly taught languages and explores the validity and reliability of the designed tasks with a sample of 73 L2 Russian learners. The findings show that the tasks in their current versions are suitable for adult L2 learners who have studied Russian from two to seven semesters. When more advanced L2 learners take these tasks, their answers tend to skew the distributions.