Being able to read and write in English as a second language (L2) in the globalized world has been increasingly considered important to gain greater personal, academic, and business achievement. This study investigates English (L2) reading and writing abilities in relation to first language (L1) reading and writing abilities, L2 vocabulary…

A large data set of L1 psycholinguistic norms (Balota "et al." 2007) was used to assess spoken L2 English lexical proficiency in cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpora. Behavioral norms included lexical decision and word naming latencies (i.e. reaction times) and accuracies for 40,481 English words. A frequency measure was…

Automated essay scoring tools are often criticized on the basis of construct validity. Specifically, it has been argued that computational scoring algorithms may be unaligned to higher-level indicators of quality writing, such as writers' demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the essay topics. In this paper, we consider how and whether the…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…