In order to characterize learner transitional competence adequately and to identify particular learning strategies of students learning a second language, both the actual performance of the learners and their intuitions about the target language must be taken into consideration. Grammaticality judgments by adult target language learners can be a valid means of obtaining the necessary intuitional data. We developed a method of eliciting intuitions of grammaticality and used this method in a pilot project involving 100 ESL students from the following language groups: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Spanish. The subjects were presented with a set of sentences some of which were well‐formed, some of which were malformed in specific ways—and were asked to make a judgment about each sentence. The use of intuitional data forces the researcher to view the learner in a new light. The results of the pilot indicate that the elicitation of intuitional data is revealing and must be pursued.
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Schachter et al. (1976) studied this question.