In today's university era, reforming the English teaching model has become a major research topic for researchers. Based on this, this paper adopts a hierarchical and progressive model construction method to further explore the reform model of university English teaching in the context of educational ecology. First, this paper discusses the…

When learners can comprehend 98% or more of the tokens within a text, the lexical difficulty of the text is unlikely to inhibit reading comprehension (Schmitt et al., 2011). This phenomenon will be referred to as the Coverage Comprehension Model (CCM). The CCM is present in countless articles that describe the percentage of tokens necessary to…

Written inquiries, which are more frequent and have less of a focus on complex thinking, are issues at school. Students are not taught how to respond to questions found in High-Level Thinking Skills (HOTS) tests, hence, their thinking abilities are generally weak. The issue for teachers is that neither they nor anyone else has been able to create…

The evaluation of text complexity is an important topic in education. While this objective has been addressed by approaches using lexical and syntactic analysis for decades, semantic complexity is less common, and the recent research works that tackle this question rely on machine learning algorithms that are hardly explainable and are not…

This paper studies the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies for optimizing the sequencing of online learning materials to students. Our approach provides an end to end pipeline for automatically deriving and evaluating robust representations of students' interactions and policies for content sequencing in online educational settings. We…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

Rasch testlet and bifactor models are two measurement models that could deal with local item dependency (LID) in assessing the dimensionality of reading comprehension testlets. This study aimed to apply the measurement models to real item response data of the Iranian EFL reading comprehension tests and compare the validity of the bifactor models…

This dissertation explored whether unnecessary linguistic complexity (LC) in mathematics and biology assessment items changes the direction and significance of differential item functioning (DIF) between subgroups emergent bilinguals (EBs) and English proficient students (EPs). Due to inconsistencies in measuring LC in items, Study One adapted a…

This article proposes a Standard Model of CALL, i.e., a compilation of fundamental theories and practices that should always be considered when creating an instructional design for the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). This proposed model is inspired by the standard model of physics which is the widely accepted understanding about how…

Although several studies have explored the effects of task sequencing on second language (L2) production, there is no established set of criteria to sequence tasks for learners in L2 writing classrooms. This study examined the effect of simple ?complex task sequencing manipulated along both resource-directing (± number of elements) and…

Recent research points to the need for a specific research focus on language task engagement because task engagement can lead to increased motivation, persistence, satisfaction, and learner achievement (Early, Rogge, & Deci, 2014; Henri, Halverson, & Graham, 2015; Reeve & Lee, 2014); a major gap in the research in this area is the lack…

The use of writing models with nonnative English speakers has received a certain amount of criticism--especially from teachers whose students copy models in their entirety or follow them too closely. The misuse of models has brought some teachers to the point where they believe that the best kind of pedagogy is to abandon writing models…

The present paper gives a general introduction to the linear logistic test model (Fischer, 1973), an extension of the Rasch model with linear constraints on item parameters, along with eRm (an R package to estimate different types of Rasch models; Mair, Hatzinger, & Mair, 2014) functions to estimate the model and interpret its parameters. The…

Despite calls for engaging assessments targeting young language learners (YLLs) between 8 and 13 years old, what makes assessment tasks engaging and how such task characteristics affect measurement quality have not been well studied empirically. Furthermore, there has been a dearth of validity research about technology-enhanced speaking tests for…

This paper presents an educational, experimental research design, aiming at examining the effect of "PAD + microlectures" EAP teaching model on Chinese undergraduates' critical thinking development. It mainly analyzes this experiment from four aspects: research question and hypotheses, difficulties in key term definitions and selection…