Due to subjectivity in oral assessment, much concentration has been put on obtaining a satisfactory measure of consistency among raters. However, the process for obtaining more consistency might not result in valid decisions. One matter that is at the core of both reliability and validity in oral assessment is rater training. Recently,…

It is widely believed that raters' cognition is an important aspect of writing assessment, as it has both logical and temporal priority over scores. Based on a critical review of previous research in this area, it is found that raters' cognition can be boiled to two fundamental issues: building text images and strategies for articulating scores.…

The present research paper introduces a translation evaluation method called Calibrated Parsing Items Evaluation (CPIE hereafter). This evaluation method maximizes translators' performance through identifying the parsing items with an optimal p-docimology and d-index (item discrimination). This method checks all the possible parses (annotations)…

Previous studies comparing holistic scoring to analytic scoring of second language writing have given mixed results. Some of them suffer from methodological drawbacks, such as limited writing sample size, limited number of raters, and lack of direct comparison of the two methods. Based on 300 writing samples graded by 14 raters, this research…

This study addressed a need to examine and improve current assessments of listening comprehension (LC) of university EFL learners. These assessments adopted a traditional approach where test-takers listened to an audio recording of a spoken interaction and then independently responded to a set of questions. This static approach to assessment is at…