This article focuses on rater severity and consistency and their relation to major changes in the rating system in a high-stakes testing context. The study is based on longitudinal data collected from 2009 to 2019 from the second language (L2) Finnish speaking subtest in the National Certificates of Language Proficiency in Finland. We investigated…

In the context of policy-driven language testing for citizenship, a growing body of research examines the political justifications and ethical implications of language requirements and test use. However, virtually no studies have looked at the role that language testers play in the evolution of language requirements. Critical gaps remain in our…

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…

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 study explores the effectiveness of using ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) language model, as an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tool for grading English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' essays. The corpus consists of 50 essays representing various types including analysis, compare and contrast, descriptive, narrative, and opinion…

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…

Communication in the real world often entails the interpretation, evaluation, and integration of content from different sources. However, it appears that the ability to integrate content into discourse has not been explicitly scored for in existing studies. This study operationalizes content integration in the analytic scoring of a…

Sign languages present particular challenges to language assessors in relation to variation in signs, weakly defined citation forms, and a general lack of standard-setting work even in long-established measures of productive sign proficiency. The present article addresses and explores these issues via a mixed-methods study of a human-rated…

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.…

The study examined the use of the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) in assessing Chinese as a second language and the challenges faced by teachers in the Chinese Language Scholarship (CLS) program. The Concurrent Triangulation Mixed Method Research was used in the study in which qualitative and quantitative data are collected simultaneously,…

In the process of measuring and assessing high-level cognitive skills, interference of rater errors in measurements brings about a constant concern and low objectivity. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of rater training on rater errors in the process of assessing individual performance. The study was conducted with a…

Severity and centrality are two main kinds of rater effects posing threats to the validity and fairness of performance assessments. Adopting Jin and Wang's (2018) extended facets modeling approach, we separately estimated the magnitude of rater severity and centrality effects in the web-based TestDaF (Test of German as a Foreign Language) writing…

This study compared holistic and analytic marking methods for their effects on parameter estimation (of examinees, raters, and items) and rater cognition in assessing speech act production in L2 Chinese. Seventy American learners of Chinese completed an oral Discourse Completion Test assessing requests and refusals. Four first-language (L1)…

This study examined the use of a popular Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Google Voice Typing (GVT), to automatically assess English as second language pronunciation. It aimed to answer the following question: What is the relationship between GVT-rated scores and human-rated scores? To answer this question, we compared audio recordings of 56…

This mixed methods study examined holistic, analytic, and part marking models (MMs) in terms of their measurement properties and impact on candidate CEFR classifications in a semi-direct online speaking test. Speaking performances of 240 candidates were first marked holistically and by part (phase 1). On the basis of phase 1 findings--which…