The last decade bears witness to an exponential growth in the use of the World Wide Web. As a result, a huge amount of documents are accessible online through search engines, whose pattern-matching capabilities have turned out to be useful for mining the Web space as a particular kind of linguistic corpus, commonly known as the Web Corpus. This article presents a novel, argumentative approach to providing proactive assistance for language usage assessment on the basis of usage indices, which are good indicators of the suitability of an expression on the basis of the Web Corpus. The user preferences consist of a number of (possibly defeasible) rules and facts which encode different aspects of adequate language usage, defining the acceptability of different terms on the basis of the computed usage indices. A defeasible argumentation system determines if a given expression is ultimately acceptable by analyzing a defeasible logic program which encodes the user's preferences.

This article shows the preliminary design process for a tailor-made Initial Test of Integrated Skills (ITIS) specially adapted to the needs of TRADILEX, a project (2020-2023) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities to study the scope and validity of using audiovisual translation (AVT) tools to develop communicative competence in a foreign language. We also design a complete virtual AVT-based teaching platform that will help to promote faster and better EFL learning. In this paper we present one of the project’s initial stages, i.e. the ITIS design and the methodological framework for the design process from draft stage to final product. The draft pilot ITIS was tested by specialists, who produced a series of reports and anticipated several potential problems that occurred when the test was carried out. We pay special attention to the changes and improvements made to the draft ITIS as well as its three-stage process and remedial measures. The validity of the ITIS is currently being tested with a pilot group. The ITIS will be complemented with a Final Test of Integrated Skills (FITIS), which is currently underway.

This article is framed within a research project based in Spain aimed at studying the use of Audiovisual Translation tools to develop communicative competences for teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language. The aims of the study are to get to know to what extent the oral and written production skills of the participants improve thanks to the implementation of an Audiovisual translation-based course, and to get to know if the overall performance of the post Integrated Skills Test is better than the pre–Integrated Skills Test after the learning process. It is also aimed to prove the validity of those language assessment tests. A mixed methodology (qualitative and quantitative analysis) was used to obtain information from the participants. Research data was collected from different universities in Spain with an initial sample of 40 applicants, 8 of which finally completed the course. Data analysis shows that oral and written production skills improve thanks to the implementation of six audio description-based lesson plans completed during a pilot course offered during the summer of 2021 to volunteer adult participants with a B2 level in English language. Furthermore, the study illustrates that the results of the final tests are better than the results of the previous ones after the intervention. We discuss the results obtained in this study and conclude that they are harmonious with former studies on the topic as they validate the use of tests to improve the development of communicative skills. Although, there is a very limited number of participants in the sample, we consider this may be used as an example of a trend that will be explored in the future, as this is a pilot study included in a wider research project which is still underway. KEYWORDS: audiovisual translation; audio description; language tests; student evaluation; second language learning; English as a foreign language; integrated skills approach.

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