Rater comments tend to be qualitatively analyzed to indicate raters' application of rating scales. This study applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quantify meaningful, behavioral information from a corpus of rater comments and triangulated that information with a many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) analysis of rater scores. The…

While many studies have addressed the benefits of technology-assisted L2 writing, limited research has delved into how generative artificial intelligence (GAI) supports students in completing their writing tasks in Mandarin Chinese. In this study, 26 university-level Mandarin Chinese foreign language students completed two writing tasks on two…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has become a valuable tool in educational settings, providing efficient and objective evaluations of student essays. However, the majority of AES systems have primarily focused on native English speakers, leaving a critical gap in the evaluation of non-native speakers' writing skills. This research addresses this gap…

There has been a surge in employing artificial intelligence (AI) in all areas of language pedagogy, not the least among them language testing and assessment. This study investigated the effects of AI-powered tools on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' speaking skills, psychological well-being, autonomy, and academic buoyancy. Using a…

With advances in technology, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have become available to assist users with a variety of tasks using voice commands. Because IPAs may induce dialogic interactions, researchers speculated that they may benefit second language learning, especially regarding pronunciation, listening and speaking skills. So far, very…

VocQGen is an automated tool designed to generate multiple-choice cloze (MCC) questions for vocabulary assessment in second language learning contexts. It leverages several natural language processing (NLP) tools and OpenAI's GPT-4 model to produce MCC items quickly from user-specified word lists. To evaluate its effectiveness, we used the first…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Interaction Competence Elicitor (ICE), a spoken dialog system (SDS) for the delivery of a paired oral discussion task in the context of language assessment. The purpose of ICE is to sustain a topic-specific conversation with a test taker in order to elicit discourse that can be later judged to…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

This study explores the construct validity of speaking tasks included in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., integrated and independent speaking tasks). Specifically, advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, MANOVA difference statistics, and discriminant function analyses (DFA) are used to assess the degree to which and in what ways responses to these…

Vocabulary plays an important part in second language learning and there are many existing techniques to facilitate word acquisition. One of these methods is code-switching, or mixing the vocabulary of two languages in one sentence. In this paper the authors propose an experimental system for computer-assisted English vocabulary learning in…