Statistical Analyses for Language Assessment

Abstract

This book enables practitioners to apply statistics effectively to the development and use of language assessments. The Workbook and CD contain datasets from actual language assessments and data analysis exercises.

Validation of the Oral Interaction Strategy Scale for speakers of Chinese as the first language in elementary schools

“…The kurtosis ranged from -0.22 (item 9) to -1.04 (item 4), indicating flat distributions. Besides, all kurtosis and skewedness values were between -2 to +2, suggesting a reasonably normal distribution (Bachman, 2004). However, the Mardia's normalized estimate of multivariate kurtosis was 128.52 with a critical ratio of 45.54.…”

Defining the Role of Assessing Strategies to Evaluate Individual Language Differences within ESP Students

“…Consequently, the importance of assessment and evaluation seems more effective while framing them into realistic vision of designing, practicing and finally for fruitful implementation within specific language skills required in a curriculum. Therefore, the context to define assessment in terms of an academic provision has been referred to a process or an act that is itself meant to gather data about the knowledge by following the attitudes toward it and finally professing the advanced skills within the group of learners to which they are interested in (Kellaghan and Greancy, 2001;Bachman, 2004). Likewise, Sarosdy et al (2006) have stated that the assessment is focusing on language learner's proficiency in terms of their achievement through judging, testing and measuring their individual progresses.…”

“…Likewise, Sarosdy et al (2006) have stated that the assessment is focusing on language learner's proficiency in terms of their achievement through judging, testing and measuring their individual progresses. Therefore, an assessment and evaluation both are used to claim the individual's description in learning process for desire to reach the required grade in particular course successfully (Bachman and Palmer, 2010). Following this principle, one can proclaim that the particular language course like of an ESP, usually assess the learner's performance during and after taking particular course of an academic field in order to develop communicative competence (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987).The value of assessment and evaluation in ESP course is rightly identified.…”

Predictors of the Czech learners’ acquisition of selected English phonemes

“…The assessor was not the students' regular teacher as the students came from three different universities in the Czech Republic. The assessor listened to each recording several times during each of two rating periods and assessed the same sample of recordings after a brief period of time and in a rearranged order, as suggested by Bachman (2004), with intra-rater reliability 0.63.…”

“…The pronunciation assessment drew on dichotomous data; the individual pronunciation features were scored right-wrong (Bachman, 2004). That means each correctly pronounced feature was assigned one point, while each incorrectly produced phoneme was classified as zero.…”