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…

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.…

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,…

According to expectation violation theory, job applicants can be upgraded or downgraded during an interview when their accent does not match employers' speech expectations. Focusing on the employment of second language French job candidates in Québec, this study explored this issue dynamically in terms of how expectations may impact the trajectory…

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…

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…

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…

An important aspect of language assessment development is to create tasks that engage the competencies required in the target situation. For this reason, English-medium university entrance tests increasingly feature integrated reading-into-writing tasks as a way of enhancing target domain representation. Despite increased use of this task type,…

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…