This chapter reports on a study investigating non-expert raters' scoring behavior and cognitive processes involved in evaluating speech acts and pragmatic routines in L2 Chinese. Pragmatic production data were collected from 51 American learners of Chinese, who completed a 12-item oral Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The learners were divided…

This experimental study explores how source use features impact raters' judgment of argumentation in a second language (L2) integrated writing test. One hundred four experienced and novice raters were recruited to complete a rating task that simulated the scoring assignment of a local English Placement Test (EPT). Sixty written responses were…

This study is the first attempt to explore the relationship between rater variables focusing on raters' language aptitude and their judgments of second language (L2) speech. Thirty-four English listeners rated 65 spontaneous native and nonnative speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency. They also completed the LLAMA language…

This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

The current paper intends to exploit the Many Facet Rasch Model to investigate and compare the impact of situations (items) and raters on test takers' performance on the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Discourse Self-Assessment Tests (DSAT). In this study, the participants were 110 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at…

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…

Assessing the content of learners' compositions is a common practice in second language (L2) writing assessment. However, the construct definition of content in L2 writing assessment potentially underrepresents the target competence in content and language integrated learning (CLIL), which aims to foster not only L2 proficiency but also critical…

This study investigates the validity and reliability of generative large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT and Google's Bard, in grading student essays in higher education based on an analytical grading rubric. A total of 15 experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors and two LLMs were asked to evaluate three student…

In this Brief Report, we describe an evaluation of and revisions to a rubric adapted from the Jacobs et al.'s (1981) ESL COMPOSITION PROFILE, with four rubric categories and 20-point rating scales, in the context of an intensive English program writing placement test. Analysis of 4 years of rating data (2016-2021, including 434 essays) using…

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.…

This replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough et al., 2019) that identified holds (i.e., temporary cessation of dynamic movement by the listener) as a reliable visual cue of non-understanding. Conversations between second language (L2) English speakers in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca…

Listener-based ratings have become a prominent means of defining second language (L2) users' global speaking ability. In most cases, local listeners are recruited to evaluate speech samples in person. However, in many teaching and research contexts, recruiting local listeners may not be possible or advisable. The goal of this study was to hone a…

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 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.…