Captura-recaptura: uma abordagem para a mensuração da profundidade do vocabulário produtivo de falantes de alemão como língua estrangeira

Abstract

This study, inspired by the work of Meara and Alcoy (2010) and Williams (2012),aimed to develop a test of German proficiency as L2, directed towards bilingualspeakers of the Portuguese/German pair, which measured the depth of lexicalknowledge. To this end, as well as the studies mentioned above, we rely on theadaptation of Capture-Recapture technique used in Ecology (PETERSEN, 1896) tothe context of Bilingualism, which consists of the development and application of twoversions of a word association task to the same group of participants at two differenttimes. Our goal, using this technique, was to verify if such a metric would be able togauge the difference between proficiency levels based on depth. Thus, we appliedtwo test versions for the Basic and Advanced level to about 15 participants each,which were answered with the interval of around two weeks. Despite the smallsample size of participants and items, we found a trend that this test is able tomeasure a difference in depth of lexical knowledge between the two levels ofproficiency considered. For purposes of comparison, a self-assessment proficiencyquestionnaire was applied to the participants, which served as further evidence of thetrend described above.