This study compared holistic and analytic marking methods for their effects on parameter estimation (of examinees, raters, and items) and rater cognition in assessing speech act production in L2 Chinese. Seventy American learners of Chinese completed an oral Discourse Completion Test assessing requests and refusals. Four native Chinese raters evaluated the examinees’ oral productions using two four-point rating scales. The holistic scale simultaneously included the following five dimensions: communicative function, prosody, fluency, appropriateness, and grammaticality; the analytic scale included sub-scales to examine each of the five dimensions. The raters scored the dataset twice with the two marking methods, respectively, and with counterbalanced order. They also verbalized their scoring rationale after performing each rating. Results revealed that both marking methods led to high reliability and produced scores with high correlation; however, analytic marking possessed better assessment quality in terms of higher reliability and measurement precision, higher percentages of Rasch model fit for examinees and items, and more balanced reference to rating criteria among raters during the scoring process.

Chinese character learning requires various reading subskills, such as radical awareness and character knowledge. Radical awareness refers to learners’ ability to identify, analyze, and apply semantic radicals in compound characters. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness and character knowledge facilitate learning semantically transparent characters. Yet, little is known regarding whether radical awareness plays an active role in the meaning retention for nontransparent characters. The meanings of transparent characters, such as “河” (river) containing the radical “氵” (water), are related to the semantic category of the radicals within the characters, whereas the meanings of nontransparent characters, such as “淑” (kind and gentle) with the same radical “氵,” are not directly related to the radicals. To fill these gaps, this study included 39 L2 Chinese learners at one American university. They completed one character-learning session, and five radical-related and character-related tasks. The results suggested that radical awareness did not positively affect the meaning retention for nontransparent characters when learners’ character knowledge was controlled. In addition, character knowledge was a moderator, which shaped the relationship between radical awareness and character retention. Pedagogical implications for the understanding of L2 Chinese compound character learning are discussed.

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Book review: Taguchi, N., & Kim, Y. (Eds.). (2018). Task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics. John Benjamins Publishing Company.  https://doi.org/10.1075/tblt.10