The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood, least developed and, yet, one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment. It is particularly important because of its potential wash-back effects on classroom practices. Given the fact that listening tests play a great role in assessing the language proficiency of students, they are expected to enjoy a hig...

We have constructed a new “Who-did-What” dataset of over 200,000 fill-in-the-gap (cloze) multiple choice reading comprehension problems constructed from the LDC English Gigaword newswire corpus. The WDW dataset has a variety of novel features. First, in contrast with the CNN and Daily Mail datasets (Hermann et al., 2015) we avoid using article summaries for question formation. Instead, each pro...

We propose a method to generate high-quality cloze test questions using a computational approach. Previous methods for automatic cloze test generation have contained some problems; specifically, there can be multiple correct answers. We found that approximately 50% of the generated answers have such errors with previous methods, which requires human post-editing was necessary in previous resear...

Since English expressions vary according to the genres, it is important for students to study questions that are generated from sentences of the target genre. Although various questions are prepared, it is still not enough to satisfy various genres which students want to learn. On the other hand, when producing English questions, sufficient grammatical knowledge and vocabulary are needed, so it...

Reading in a second language (L2) is complex process that incorporates linguistic knowledge and literacy abilities, as well strategic competence to approach different types of reading tasks depending on goals. However, much the previous research was limited correlational studies focused relative contribution broad categories L2 proficiency first-language (L1) comprehension. investigations into ...

Computer generation of cloze tasks still falls short of full automation; most current systems are used by teachers as authoring aids. Improved methods to estimate cloze quality are needed for full automation. We investigated lexical reading difficulty as a novel automatic estimator of cloze quality, to which cooccurrence frequency of words was compared as an alternate estimator. Rather than rel...

We present evidence for a monitoring process in language perception at the word level, reflected by a P600. This P600 is triggered when a conflict evolves because the brain encounters an unexpected linguistic item when another item is highly expected. To resolve this conflict between representations, the brain monitors the input to check for possible processing errors. A P600 was hypothesized t...

More innovative test methods may measure language learners’ test performance more accurately, contributing to much fairer decisions. This study examined Iranian language learners’ performance on cloze-elide test as an innovative, integrative test method. It specifically focused on investigating whether personality types correlated with their performance and whether personality types could predi...

s. No studies have investigated whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them. In studying this possibility, 90 subjects, 30 from each grade level, were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to Reprints may be requested from Ronald V. Evans, University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida. by gue...