ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 73, Issue 1, 1986

Teacher training institutes in the Netherlands submit to their students tests of grammaticality judgments concerning FL sentences, 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 than the latter. The purposes of this study were to examine two questions : (1) Is 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? To this end, an experiment was designed. 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 administered to matched groups of Dutch students of French of the level mentioned. 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 grammatically 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.

The results of the pilot study suggest that the two tasks are not essentially different.