Background: Nonword repetition (NWR) involves the ability to perceive, store, recall and reproduce phonological sequences. These same abilities play a role in word and morpheme learning. Cross-linguistic studies of performance on NWR tasks, word learning, and morpheme learning yield patterns of increased performance on all three tasks as a…

Modern socio-cognitive and meaning-oriented approaches to foreign language teaching emphasize the role of learner autonomy, which involves being aware of and responsible for one's own ways of learning as well as the utilization of one's own strengths and work on weaknesses (van Lier 1996). Allowing learners to perform self-assessment can provide a…

This study presents an efficient approach to personalized mispronunciation detection of Taiwanese-accented English. The main goal of this study was to detect frequently occurring mispronunciation patterns of Taiwanese-accented English instead of scoring English pronunciations directly. The proposed approach quickly identifies personalized…

Evidence suggests that children living in areas designated as socially disadvantaged may be at risk for literacy difficulties. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover &Gough, 1986) is a theoretical model that sets out to describe the processes that children need to develop to become proficient readers, that is word…

In the present era of outcome assessment and accountability, self-efficacy is a popular outcome measure in outdoor and adventure education. Self-efficacy beliefs are context specific perceptions an individual possesses about a likelihood of success in future tasks and are related to well-being confidence, and persistence. However, recent research…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

The purpose of this quantitative research study was to investigate the use of rote learning in basic skills of mathematics and spelling of 12 high school students, from a career and technical high school, in an effort to learn if the pedagogy of rote fits in the frameworks of today's education. The study compared the accuracy of…

Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is a new theoretical framework for psychological and educational testing that is designed to provide detailed information about examinees' strengths and weaknesses in specific knowledge structures and processing skills. During the last three decades, more than a dozen psychometric models have been developed…

Cross-lingual tests are assessment instruments created in one language and adapted for use with another language group. Practitioners and researchers use cross-lingual tests for various descriptive, analytical and selection purposes both in comparative studies across nations and within countries marked by linguistic diversity (Hambleton, 2005).…

The quality of measurement systems used in almost all natural sciences other than behavior analysis is usually evaluated through calibration study rather than relying on interobserver agreement. We demonstrated some of the basic features of calibration using observer-measured rates of free-operant responding from 10 scripted 10-min calibration…

Despite the growing interest in examining the link between peer-peer collaborative dialogue and second language (L2) development in recent years (Swain, Brooks, & Tocalli-Beller, 2002), much of the empirical work in this regard focused on face-to-face communication, leaving the operationalization of collaborative dialogue in text-based…

Pseudo Bayes probability estimates are weighted averages of raw and modeled probabilities; these estimates have been studied primarily in nonpsychometric contexts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate pseudo Bayes probability estimates as applied to the estimation of psychometric test score distributions and chained equipercentile equating…

The role of teacher-student interaction and collaboration in solving linguistic problems has recently been in the center of SLA research. Accordingly, this study investigated the effect of Oral Interactive Feedback (OIF) on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian intermediate EFL learners' writing. After ensuring the homogeneity using Preliminary…

This paper examines whether and to what extent data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve the lexico-grammatical use of abstract nouns in L2 writing. A topic-based corpus was compiled to develop concordance learning activities, and 40 Chinese students majoring in English were randomly assigned to a control group or an experimental group. At…

This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language learning classrooms. A total of 34 intermediate level university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were asked to accomplish three different wiki-based collaborative writing tasks, (argumentative, informative and decision-making) working…