TESOL practitioners, especially in Asia, tend to believe that reliable assessment of students' L2 English speech can be done solely by L1 English native speakers with sufficient teaching and assessment experiences. Such a belief, however, may need to be reconsidered from a new perspective of "diversity and inclusivity." This study used…

This study aims to examine whether differences exist in the factors influencing the difficulty of scoring English summaries and determining scores based on the raters' attributes, and to collect candid opinions, considerations, and tentative suggestions for future improvements to the analytic rubric of summary writing for English learners. In this…

Raters vary from each other in their severity and leniency in rating performance. This study examined the factors affecting rater severity in peer assessments of oral presentations in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), focusing on peer raters' self-construal and presentation abilities. Japanese university students enrolled in EFL classes…

The performance decision tree (PDT; Fulcher et al., 2011) is a rubric style that is applicable to performance assessment, with origins in Upshur and Turner's (1995) empirically derived binary-choice, boundary-definition (EBB) scale. It is easier for raters to assess performance by evaluating multiple binary-choice descriptors. Additionally,…

This study explored two assessment approaches to oral performances: analytical complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) indices and human raters' evaluations. CAF indices are frequently used in second-language speaking (L2) research; however, because tasks are communicative and goal-oriented, the degree to which students achieve such communicative…

In this paper we use novel data to test the direct and indirect paths between teacher self-efficacy and student outcomes. This includes how teacher self-efficacy is linked to student, teacher, and expert rater views of lesson quality. Our results illustrate how the link between teacher self-efficacy and instructional quality is sensitive to how…

Purpose: This study builds a new system for automatically assessing learners' speech elicited from an oral discourse completion task (DCT), and evaluates the prediction capability of the system with a view to better understanding factors deemed influential in predicting speaking proficiency scores and the pedagogical implications of the system.…

While listeners tend to downgrade speakers' accent and comprehensibility when they perceive them to be from a different language community--a process known as reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS)--research has generally relied solely on quantitative data such as Likert scale ratings. The current study sought to extend the analysis further by…

This study searched for open-source semantic similarity tools and evaluated their effectiveness in automated content scoring of fact-based essays written by English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners. Fifty writing samples under a fact-based writing task from an academic English course in a Japanese university were collected and a gold standard…

Background: In our research project, we have developed a scoring rubric for a second language (L2) summary writing for English as a foreign language (EFL) students in Japanese universities. This study aimed to examine the applicability of our five-dimensional rubric, which features both analytic and holistic assessments, to classrooms in the EFL…

Background: This study aims to develop a low-stakes assessment tool to establish a classroom English language benchmark that Japanese teachers of English can use for their own professional development purposes. To start with, we describe the differences between CLA (Classroom Language Assessment) in Hong Kong and the IDS (Integrative Diagnostic…

This study applied a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model to explore how 27 first-year university students in two different English proficiency groups improved their lexicogrammatical choices and metafunctions for writing analytical exposition essays during a 15-week course. To explore how "the teaching learning cycle" influences…

This study was designed to determine how well existing analytic rating scales functioned in the assessment of low- to mid-proficiency Japanese university students' interactive English speaking ability when engaged in small group discussions. Many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) was employed to evaluate the quality of adapted rating scales for…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

This article presents a discourse analytic study of how the concept of impartiality is socially constructed by members of the development aid community through an examination of linguistic traits and patterns within (a) inter- and intraorganizational interactions and (b) relevant aid evaluation policy documents. A qualitative analysis of…