Assessing integrated reading-into-writing task performances is known to be challenging, and analytic rating scales have been found to better facilitate the scoring of these performances than other common types of rating scales. However, little is known about how specific operationalizations of the reading-into-writing construct in analytic rating…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness…

This study employed a mixed-methods approach to examine how rater performance develops during a semester-long rater certification program for an English as a Second Language (ESL) writing placement test at a large US university. From 2016 to 2018, we tracked three groups of novice raters (n = 30) across four rounds in the certification program.…

Despite consistent calls for authentic stimuli in listening tests for better construct representation, unscripted texts have been rarely adopted in high-stakes listening tests due to perceived inefficiency. This study details how a local academic listening test was developed using authentic unscripted audio-visual texts from the local target…

Given the lack of computational tools available for assessing second language (L2) production in Korean, this study introduces a novel automated tool called the Korean Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (KOSCA) for measuring syntactic complexity in L2 Korean production. As an open-source graphic user interface (GUI) developed in Python, KOSCA provides…

Differences in rater judgments that are systematically related to construct-irrelevant characteristics threaten the fairness of rater-mediated writing assessments. Accordingly, it is essential that researchers and practitioners examine the degree to which the psychometric quality of rater judgments is comparable across test-taker subgroups.…

An automated essay scoring (AES) program is a software system that uses techniques from corpus and computational linguistics and machine learning to grade essays. In this study, we aimed to describe and evaluate particular language features of Coh-Metrix for a novel AES program that would score junior and senior high school students' essays from…

Standard-setting is an essential component of test development, supporting the meaningfulness and appropriate interpretation of test scores. However, in the high-stakes testing environment of aviation, standard-setting studies are underexplored. To address this gap, we document two stages in the standard-setting procedures for the Overseas Flight…

Among the variety of selected response formats used in L2 reading assessment, multiple-choice (MC) is the most commonly adopted, primarily due to its efficiency and objectiveness. Given the impact of assessment results on teaching and learning, it is necessary to investigate the degree to which the MC format reliably measures learners' L2 reading…

Over the past decades, the application of Rasch measurement in language assessment has gradually increased. In the present study, we coded 215 papers using Rasch measurement published in 21 applied linguistics journals for multiple features. We found that seven Rasch models and 23 software packages were adopted in these papers, with many-facet…

Argument-based validation requires test developers and researchers to specify what is entailed in test interpretation and use. Doing so has been shown to yield advantages (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2010), but it also requires an analysis of how the concerns of language testers can be conceptualized in the terms used to construct a…

Measuring language dominance, broadly defined as the relative strength of each of a bilingual's two languages, remains a crucial methodological issue in bilingualism research. While various methods have been proposed, the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) has been one of the most widely used tools for measuring language dominance. While previous…

The evaluation of sign language proficiency needs to be based on measures with well-established psychometric proprieties. To date, no valid and reliable test is available to assess Polish Sign Language ("Polski Jezyk Migowy," PJM) skills in deaf children. Hence, our aim with this study was to adapt the British Sign Language Receptive…

Sparse-rated data are common in operational performance-based language tests, as an inevitable result of assigning examinee responses to a fraction of available raters. The current study investigates the precision of two generalizability-theory methods (i.e., the rating method and the subdividing method) specifically designed to accommodate the…

This article explores ways to assess interactional performance, and reports on the use of a test format that standardizes the interlocutor's linguistic and interactional contributions to the exchange. It describes the construction and administration of six scripted speech tasks (instruction, advice, and sales tasks) with pre-vocational learners (n…