Evaluation of the content of free texts is a challenging task for humans. Automation of this process is largely useful in order to reduce human related errors. We consider one instance of the “free texts” assessment problems; automatic essay grading where the task is to grade student written essays automatically given course materials and a set of human-graded essays as training data. We use a ...

Two experiments examined the claim for distinct implicit and explicit learning modes in the artificial grammar-learning task (Reber, 1967, 1989). Subjects initially attempted to memorize strings of letters generated by a finite-state grammar and then classified new grammatical and nongrammatical strings. Experiment 1 showed that subjects' assessment of isolated parts of strings was sufficient t...

Speaking assessment is still construed as a complicated, under-researched process from the vantage point of tasks and rater characteristics. The present study aimed at investigating if and how English Major and none English Major teachers differ in their perception of the construct of oral proficiency while assessing learners’ L2 oral proficiency.  To this end, 38 male and female non-native EFL...

This study aimed at investigating the comparative effect of using self-assessment vs. peer-assessment on young EFL learners’ performance on selective and productive reading tasks. To do so, 56 young learners from among 70 students in four intact classes were selected based on their performance on the A1 Movers Test. Then, the participants were randomly divided into two groups, self-assessment a...

The score reliability of language performance tests has attracted increasing interest. Classical Test Theory cannot examine multiple sources of measurement error. Generalizability theory extends Classical Test Theory to provide a practical framework to identify and estimate multiple factors contributing to the total variance of measurement. Generalizability theory by using analysis of variance ...

Task-based instruction is arguably associated with fostering fluent L2 speech distant from native-like accuracy. Of several methodological options recommended for accounting for accuracy problems of meaning-first approaches to language teaching, planning time has been explored in this study. Three groups of English majors watched a cartoon and narrated their accounts of watching under no-planni...

In this report, we consider the task of automated assessment of English as a Second Language (ESOL) examination scripts written in response to prompts eliciting free text answers. We review and critically evaluate previous work on automated assessment for essays, especially when applied to ESOL text. We formally define the task as discriminative preference ranking and develop a new system train...