Test method facet is one of the factors which can have an influence on the test takers’ performance. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of two different response types, multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice test, on the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ reading comprehension performance. To this end, 40 pre-intermediate and intermediate learners par...

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of modified cloze procedure on writing proficiency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 110 participants studying at Semnan University majoring in English literature were tested on CELT proficiency test. 65 participants who were found to be homogenous were selected and assigned randomly to two groups...

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

This paper examines the effect of gender and type of stem on Iranian test takers’ performance on the grammar section of a nation-wide language proficiency test. In so doing, the scores of 2931 examinees (1107 female and 1824 male) who sat Tarbiat Modares English proficiency test were obtained. The examinees’ scores on three types of MC grammar items with different kinds of stems (i.e., blank fi...

The multiple choice cloze (MCC) question format is commonly used to assess students' comprehension. It is an especially useful format for ITS because it is fully automatable and can be used on any text. Unfortunately, very little is known about the factors that influence MCC question difficulty and student performance on such questions. In order to better understand student performance on MCC q...

Natural language understanding often requires deep semantic knowledge. Expanding on previous proposals, we suggest that some important aspects of semantic knowledge can be modeled as a language model if done at an appropriate level of abstraction. We develop two distinct models that capture semantic frame chains and discourse information while abstracting over the specific mentions of predicate...