Different language sample elicitation techniques may be appropriate for different linguistic phenomena and for learners at different phases of acquisition. These techniques include elicited production, manipulation of given linguistic material (sentence combining, sentence completion), intuition and grammaticality judgment tests, introspection, cloze procedure, imitation, dictation or partial dictation, and translation. It also finds that different data types can locate the learner at various phases of learning, and that the choice of appropriate elicitation techniques depends on factors such as proficiency level, linguistic phenomena in question, age, and educational background. The comparison of results from different techniques suggests that there is a great deal of individual variation in the tasks a given learner can handle, which has implications for both data elicitation and teaching practice. (MSE)