Measuring Global Oral Proficiency in SLA Research: A New Elicited Imitation Test of L2 Chinese Shu-Ling Wu, Defense Language Institute Lourdes Ortega, Georgetown University Abstract: This article describes a new Chinese elicited imitation test (EIT) and reports on a study that investigated the degree to which it functions as a tool that can be used in second language acquisition research to gauge global second language (L2) oral proficiency. Eighty L2 Chinese learners sampled from two university curricular levels so as to represent high and low linguistic abilities, and including both heritage and foreign language learners, participated in the study by completing the EIT as well as an oral narrative task and a background questionnaire. The results suggest that the new Chinese EIT can help measure overall oral linguistic proficiency in L2 Chinese for a variety of research purposes. Key words: elicited imitation, SLA, proficiency testing, heritage language learners, L2 Chinese, CAF measures Introduction A hallmark of research, policy, and practice in the field of foreign language education is the existence of large-scale standardized proficiency tests that are designed to elicit encompassing evidence of the range of functional language abilities and communicative competencies in a target language. In the United States, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Guidelines (ACTFL, 2012) offer the theoretical backdrop for a