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…

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 paper proposes to use depth perception to represent raters' decision in holistic evaluation of ESL essays, as an alternative medium to conventional form of numerical scores. The researchers verified the new method's accuracy and inter/intra-rater reliability by inviting 24 ESL teachers to perform different representations when rating 60…

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…

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

The quality of writing in a second language (L2) is one of the indicators of the level of proficiency for many college students to be eligible for departmental studies. Although certain software programs, such as Intelligent Essay Assessor or IntelliMetric, have been introduced to evaluate second-language writing quality, an overall assessment of…

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…

Differential rater severity (DRS), one prevalent case of differential rater functioning (aka rater bias or rater interaction) effects, manifests itself when a rater assigns unusually severe or lenient ratings, threatening the validity and fairness of rater-mediated assessment. Building on a many-facets Rasch measurement (MFRM) approach, this study…

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,…

This research paper employs an exploratory framework to evaluate the potential of ChatGPT as an Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) tool in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Thailand. The main objective is to investigate how well ChatGPT can assess students' writing using prompts and pre-defined rubrics compared to human raters.…

The current study sought to examine whether explicit instruction affects teacher evaluators in terms of a six-factor Teacher Evaluation (TE) model encompassing Perception, Method, System, Content, Purpose, and Outcome. Moreover, it explored how training of the evaluators affects their practices in actual evaluation. To this end, twenty EFL…

This systematic review examines 22 studies (2024-2025) on the use of generative AI, primarily ChatGPT, for providing feedback in English writing instruction for language learners. It identifies the types of feedback AI offers, its effectiveness relative to teacher and peer feedback, and perceptions from students and teachers. Findings show AI…

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)…