Indigenous Australians represent 2.2% of the working age population, yet account for only 1.4% of all university enrolments. In relation to higher degree research students, Indigenous Australians account for 1.1% of enrolments, but only 0.8% of all higher degree research completions. This paper reports on findings that emerged from an Australian…

Classic sociological solutions to cooperation problems were rooted in the moral judgments group members make about one another's behaviors, but more recent research on prosocial behaviors has largely ignored this foundational work. Here, we extend theoretical accounts of the social effect of moral judgments. Where scholars have emphasized the…

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of using collaborative translation tasks (CTTs) for teaching figurative language. The study also sought to explore the perceptions of the learners toward the efficacy of CTTs for learning figurative language through conducting interviews. The participants of the study included 60 English as a…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

The current study examined how two groups of native speakers--monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans--differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

Grounded on the tradition of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), this paper aimed at contrasting the presence of metadiscourse resources in a book preface of Filipino and English authors. It especially sought to see the similarities and differences of interactive and interactional markers between two cultures. A total of thirty book prefaces on language…

The importance of teacher effectiveness is well supported by studies that document variation in teachers' abilities to contribute to student achievement gains. All else being equal, students taught by some teachers experience greater achievement gains than do students taught by other teachers. In response to initiatives to increase educator…

The University of Missouri (MU) participated in the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues Initiative (DDI) supporting faculty development projects at over 40 institutions of higher education from 2006-2010. This paper reports findings from an evaluation conducted with instructors who not only engaged in faculty development workshops but also…

This paper reports on a mixed-methods approach to evaluate rater performance on a local oral English proficiency test. Three types of reliability estimates were reported to examine rater performance from different perspectives. Quantitative results were also triangulated with qualitative rater comments to arrive at a more representative picture of…

The article outlines a programme theory for the Swedish school inspection. The theory has a format of 'if … then … because', whereby the last term states one or more generative mechanisms behind the reactions to inspection, and the former terms imply what the inspectorate does and which reactions it receives. The assumptions of the theory are…

In the present study, aspects of the measurement of writing are disentangled in order to investigate the validity of inferences made on the basis of writing performance and to describe implications for the assessment of writing. To include genre as a facet in the measurement, we obtained writing scores of 12 texts in four different genres for each…

This study investigated whether children born in a second language (L2) environment pronounce their L2 with foreign accents and, if so, when foreign accents first emerge. This study also examined the latest age of onset (AO) of extensive L2 experience at which native L2 pronunciation is possible and explored several factors that affect the degree…

This paper tries to analyze the problems arising in translation of English adverbs to Persian. For this purpose, the researcher introduces all kinds of English and Persian adverbs for familiarity with them and then asks some translation students to translate some sentences (they are free to use a dictionary). Two English translation teachers were…

In today's world, much of what used to be individual work has become collaborative. Moreover, complex change initiatives often require individuals within and across organizations to team up to set and achieve meaningful goals. The role of researchers and evaluators is to offer support that can be used to strengthen the work of organizations and…