Within the project an attempt was made to gauge the students' attitudes towards peer assessment This was a tw%ld process. the students' attitudes were canvassed both prior to the peer assessment exercise and at the end of it 771is paper focuses on those students who had second thoughts abollt peer assessment and the reasons given for these shifis in attitude The implications of the findings (or implementing peer assessment on undergraduate courses are then discussed

This article describes part of an investigation into the reliability and potential benefits of incorporating peer assessment into English language programmes.Undergraduate Engineering students attending a university in Hong Kong were asked to assess the English language proficiency of their peers -among other assessment criteria such as preparation, content, organisation, and delivery -as exhibited in the seminar, oral presentation and written report of an integrated group project. The paper compares the students' attitudes towards assessing both the English language proficiency and the other aspects of performance of their peers. It also compares peer and teacher assessments. The findings suggest that students had a less positive attitude towards assessing their peers' language proficiency, but they did not score their peers' language proficiency very differently from the other assessment criteria. Students and teachers were different in their respective marking behaviours and the ways oral and written language proficiency were interpreted. While students derived benefits from the peer assessment exercise, a question mark hangs over incorporating peer assessment for both language proficiency and the other criteria into the regular assessment process until such differences are resolved. Suggestions are made for improvement in procedures and future research. I IntroductionAssessment is a critical activity in any instructional operation. One school of thought, which is increasingly gaining acceptance, argues that it is important for both learners and teachers to be involved in and have control over the assessment methods, procedures and outcomes, as well as their underlying rationale. Jafarpur (1991), for example, pointed out that if we are to increase the responsibility of the learner in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) study programs, this necessitates the adjustment of testing procedures. This is the Pre-Published Version 2Peer assessment, defined as 'an arrangement in which individuals consider the amount, level, value, worth, quality of success of the products or outcomes of learning of peers of similar status ' (Topping, 1998: 250), is becoming more important as an alternative assessment method, among others such as self-assessment (see, for example, Boud, 1989; 1995; Tudor, 1996) and portfolio assessment (see for example, Mondock, 1997; Hamp-Lyons and Condon, 2000).The benefits of incorporating peer assessment into the regular assessment procedures have been discussed in a number of studies (see for example, Burnett and Cavaye, 1980; Earl, 1986; Goldfinch and Raeside, 1990; Webb, 1995; Kwan and Leung, 1996). Peer assessment is believed to enable learners to develop abilities and skills denied to them in a learning environment in which the teacher alone assesses their work. In other words, it provides learners with the opportunity to take responsibility for analysing, monitoring and evaluating aspects of both the learning process and product of their peers. Research studies examining this mode of ass...

Overcoming

Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the permutations of constituency and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. Concgrams are identified without prior input from the user (other than to set the size of the span) employing a fully automated search that reveals all of the word association patterns that exist in a corpus. This study argues that concgrams represent more fully word associations in a corpus. Most concgrams seem to be non-contiguous, and show both constituency (AB, ACB) and positional (AB, BA) variations. Further studies of concgrams will help in the task of uncovering the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987).

Undergraduate students, and their class teachers, assessed the performance of their peers in three oral and written tasks as part of a group project. The two sets of marks awarded by peers and teachers were subsequently compared to find out whether the students were competent to assess their peers alongside their class teachers and whether this competence, or lack of it, was partly determined by the nature of the task being assessed. A number of statistical tests were run to establish the levels of agreement, the ranges, differences and relationship between peer and teacher assessments. The results have led us to conclude that the peer assessments are not sufficiently reliable to be used to supplement teacher assessments. Students' competencies in peer assessment do not appear to be dependent on the nature of the task being assessed, but there is some evidence that practical experience of assessing a particular task type can lead to an improvement in students' assessment skills when they assess a similar task. The paper also discusses possible improvements in peer assessment procedures based on the experiences gained.