Purpose: The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) is a technological tool designed for comprehensive recordings and automated analysis of young children's daily language and auditory environments. LENA recordings play a crucial role in both clinical interventions and research, offering insights into the amount of spoken language children are…

Purpose: To date, there are no automated tools for the identification and fine-grained classification of paraphasias within discourse, the production of which is the hallmark characteristic of most people with aphasia (PWA). In this work, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to automatically predict paraphasia targets in Cinderella story…

Multimodal learning analytics, which is collection, analysis, and report of diverse learning traces to better understand and improve the learning process, has been producing a series of interesting prototypes to analyze learning activities that were previously hard to objectively evaluate. However, none of these prototypes have been taken out of…

Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) has increasingly become a useful tool in oral proficiency testing for Second Language (L2) learners. However, limited studies investigate the alignment of ASS indices with the Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF)--the three dimensions in evaluating L2 speakers' oral proficiency, and the subsequent impact indices…

Laboratory observations are a mainstay of language development research, but transcription is costly. We test whether speech recognition technology originally designed for day-long contexts can be usefully applied to this use-case. We compared automated adult word and child vocalization counts from Language Environment Analysis (LENA[TM]) to those…

In the United States the number of English Language Learner students is steadily increasing. Many ELLs speak and understand limited English, resulting in achievement that lags far behind that of their classmates (Thomas, 2015). Recruiting the support of educators who come in contact with ELL students on a daily basis promoted a solution to this…

The extensive use of automated speech scoring in large-scale speaking assessment can be revolutionary not only to test design and rating, but also to the learning and instruction of speaking based on how students and teachers perceive and react to this technology. However, its washback remained underexplored. This mixed-method study aimed to…

As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

Meta-syntheses have reported positive impacts of feedback for student achievement at different stages of education and have been influential in establishing feedback as an effective strategy to support student learning. However, these syntheses combine studies of a variety of different feedback approaches, combine studies where feedback is one of…

This research report provides an overview of the R&D efforts at Educational Testing Service related to its capability for automated scoring of nonnative spontaneous speech with the "SpeechRater"? automated scoring service since its initial version was deployed in 2006. While most aspects of this R&D work have been published in…

This paper reports on the potential of Oral Elicited Imitation (OEI) as a format for output practice, building on an analysis of picture-matching and spoken data collected from 36 university-level learners of German as a second language (L2) in a web-based assessment task inspired by Input Processing (VanPatten, 2004). The design and development…

The purpose of the present study is to assess second language (L2) spoken English using automated scoring techniques. Automated scoring aims to classify a large set of learners' oral performance data into a small number of discrete oral proficiency levels. In automated scoring, objectively measurable features such as the frequencies of lexical and…

Communicative approaches to language teaching that emphasize the importance of speaking (e.g., task-based language teaching) require innovative and evidence-based means of assessing oral language. Nonetheless, research has yet to produce an adequate assessment model for oral language (Chun 2006; Downey et al. 2008). Limited by automatic speech…

Providing captions for videos used in online courses is an area of interest for institutions of higher education. There are legal and ethical ramifications as well as time constraints to consider. Captioning tools are available, but some universities rely on the auto-generated YouTube captions. This study looked at a particular type of video--the…