Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems are developed based on interdisciplinary research and technological advances such as natural language processing, computer sciences, and latent semantic analysis. Despite a steady increase in research publications in this area, the results of AWE investigations are often mixed, and their validity may be…

Providing both effective feedback applications and reliable assessment practices are two central issues in ESL/EFL writing instruction contexts. Giving individual feedback is very difficult in crowded classes as it requires a great amount of time and effort for instructors. Moreover, instructors likely employ inconsistent assessment procedures,…

This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to…