Time limit

You will be given less than two hours to finish the test. Most of you will need the whole two hours. The objective questions will take one hour, and the writing questions will take the other hour. I suggest that you do the objective questions first because they might give you some of the ideas and phrases you need to write better.

Question types

The midterm will include a variety of question types:

• The first type is a simple matching style question similar to what you have seen on the practice quizzes I have been giving you so far. In this type you will have to match definitions with their terms or match statements with the groups they belong to. For example, a statement like "Language learning is a process of habit formation." might be matched with the term "behaviorism". You will be able to see several choices. Some of these will be easy, but some will be difficult or easy to get confused by. They will cover everything we have learned so far, including terms and ideas from the first six weeks.

• The second type of question will be multiple choice. These will also resemble the questions I have given you in the practice quizzes, so study those practice quizzes hard. Some of those questions will be very tricky, so you will have to be very familiar with the material. Unlike most multiple choice, these questions sometimes actually test higher level thinking skills.

• The third kind of question you will be given will be a writing question similar to what you have seen on the quiz. You will have to apply what you have learned about academic writing to clearly show me what you know about SLA. Unlike the questions on the first quiz that tested mostly definitions and their explanations, these midterm questions will test your ability to explain cause and effect in SLA and describe various processes in detail. For example, you might have to explain how each of the considerations can be used to explain why adults have difficulty. In each question you might have to describe evidence to support what you are saying. For these questions it is very important that you focus on the question. You must be able to understand the question and answer it directly with a well-supported paragraph. I will penalize you for giving details that are off topic or even for not making it clear how your details are relevant.

Subject matter