This study examines Korean L2 learners' production of English phonological contrasts (e.g., consonant-final versus vowel-final forms) that are absent in their L1. Twenty university students divided into high- and low-proficiency groups participated in the study. Their productions were analyzed for segmental accuracy and error patterns. Results…

This study investigated the efficacy of varying degrees of written corrective feedback (WCF) explicitness on the accuracy of revised drafts and new pieces of writing among learners of different proficiency levels. A total of 130 learners of English were divided into three proficiency groups (basic, independent, and proficient users), with learners…

With the growing attention on large-scale educational testing and assessment, the ability to process substantial volumes of response data becomes crucial. Current estimation methods within item response theory (IRT), despite their high precision, often pose considerable computational burdens with large-scale data, leading to reduced computational…

The congruency effect--that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in…

The Poya Songbook, an integral part of Zhuang traditional culture, embodies rich music and folklore passed down through generations. This study aims to examine the historical development and literacy transmission of the Poya Songbook for education and literacy studies in Funing County, Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. Drawing upon a…

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing has raised concerns regarding accuracy, ethics, and scientific rigour. Some AI content detectors may not accurately identify AI-generated texts, especially those that have undergone paraphrasing. Therefore, there is a pressing need for efficacious approaches or guidelines to…

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, their pervasive use in every field, and the growing understanding of the benefits they bring have led actors in the education sector to pursue research in this field. In particular, the use of artificial intelligence tools has become more prevalent in the education sector due to the…

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study delving into EFL students' experiences and perspectives on a text-based pedagogical chatbot. Utilizing chatbot-mediated interaction, a questionnaire survey, and focus group discussions, the study centers around the cognitive and affective domains of learning in relation to the chatbot's affordances and…

Automated writing evaluation feedback (AWE) has become popular in writing classrooms. However, few studies have conducted a comprehensive review of the employment of AWE in learning areas. This study aimed to provide a systematic review of the current research on AWE feedback, including its validity, effects, and students' engagement with AWE…

This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

This paper opens with a family anecdote in which my future mother in-law, when asked what wise advice she would offer undergraduate university students, replied, "I would tell them it's not going to be okay." Can we learn to keep engaging with the world despite its inevitable disappointments? I propose that Stoic philosophy, by…

Response style, one common aberrancy in non-cognitive assessments in psychological fields, is problematic in terms of inaccurate estimation of item and person parameters, which leads to serious reliability, validity, and fairness issues (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 2001; Bolt & Johnson, 2009; Bolt & Newton, 2011). Response style refers to…

For passage-based tests, items that belong to a common passage often violate the local independence assumption of unidimensional item response theory (UIRT). In this case, ignoring local item dependence (LID) and estimating item parameters using a UIRT model could be problematic because doing so might result in inaccurate parameter estimates,…

Rater-mediated assessments exhibit scoring challenges due to the involvement of human raters. The quality of human ratings largely determines the reliability, validity, and fairness of the assessment process. Our research recommends that the evaluation of ratings should be based on two aspects: a theoretical model of human judgment and an…

We explored the topic of irony comprehension by preschoolers. Two hundred and thirty-one children (77 four-year-olds, 89 five-year-olds, and 65 six-year-olds) were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (ICT, Banasik and Bokus, in: Poster presented at the psycholinguistics conference in Flanders, Berg en Dal, 2012). Participants were asked…