The use of assessments that require rater judgment (i.e., rater-mediated assessments) has become increasingly popular in high-stakes language assessments worldwide. Using a systematic literature review, the purpose of this study is to identify and explore the dominant methods for evaluating rating quality within the context of research on…

The researchers of various disciplines often use qualitative and quantitative research methods and approaches for their studies. Some of these researchers like to be known as qualitative researchers; others like to be regarded as quantitative researchers. The researchers, thus, are sharply polarised; and they involve in a competition of pointing…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children born preterm (< 37 weeks) and/or who have low birth weight (< 2,500 g) catch up with their full term peers in terms of their language abilities at early school age (= 5 to < 9 years). Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies that fit the inclusion…

Lexical bundles are worthy of attention in both teaching and testing writing as they function as basic building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study focuses on the rated writing responses to the email tasks in the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program® General test (CELPIP-General) and explores the extent to which lexical…

We addressed Deville and Chalhoub-Deville's (2006), Schoonen's (2012), and Xi and Mollaun's (2006) call for research into the contextual features that are considered related to person-by-task interactions in the framework of generalizability theory in two ways. First, we quantitatively synthesized the generalizability studies to determine the…

Elicited imitation (EI) has been widely used to examine second language (L2) proficiency and development and was an especially popular method in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, as the field embraced more communicative approaches to both instruction and assessment, the use of EI diminished, and the construct-related validity of EI scores as a…

We compared the performance of Hispanic students from California, Texas, and Arizona on the two Advanced Placement (AP) English exams (i.e., English Language and Composition and English Literature and Composition) using archival data from the College Board from 1997 through 2012. Pearson chi-square tests yielded statistically significant…

This research project undertook a review and synthesis of previous research on the effectiveness of feedback for individual writing development. The work plan was divided into two main phases. First, we surveyed all available studies that have investigated the effectiveness of writing feedback, including both quantitative and qualitative research,…

Discusses a serious problem that has existed for years in language research with regard to the use of the inferential statistic known as the t test. (12 references) (JL)

Reviews the role of statistical hypothesis testing in research, discusses the problems with multiple t tests, indicates when they are a problem, and suggests a compromise solution. (one reference) (JL)

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between a set of item characteristics and the difficulty of TOEFL[R] dialogue items. Identifying characteristics that are related to item difficulty has the potential to improve the efficiency of the item-writing process The study employed 365 TOEFL dialogue items, which were coded on 49…

This article reviews previous studies of the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on SLA, pointing out a number of methodological problems. It then reports on a new study of the effects of these two types of corrective feedback on the acquisition of past tense -ed. In an experimental design (two experimental groups and a control…

The 19 chapters of this text on assessment in special education are divided into two parts. Part 1 discusses basic concepts in assessment in special education. Part 2 addresses the special education process by describing steps in the assessment continuum. Individual chapters examine the following topics: (1) an introduction to assessment; (2)…