Much of the power of a computer tutor comes from its ability to assess students. In some domains, including oral reading, assessing the proficiency of a student is a challenging task for a computer. Our approach for assessing student reading proficiency is to use data that a computer tutor collects through its interactions with a student to estimate his performance on a human-administered test ...

In this paper, we investigate automatic language proficiency assessment from learners’ utterances generated through shadowing and reading aloud. By increasing the degrees of difficulty of learners’ tasks for each practice, we examine how the automatic scores, the conventional GOP and proposed F-GOP, change according to the cognitive loads posed on learners. We also investigate the effect and si...

Neural systems involved in the processing of written language have been identified by a number of functional imaging studies. Structural changes in cortical anatomy that occur in the course of literacy acquisition, however, remain largely unknown. Here, we follow elementary school children over their first 2 years of formal reading instruction and use tensor-based morphometry to relate reading ...

The purpose of this research was to develop a wireless handheld system for supporting individual and cooperative reading activities in Chinese reading comprehension. The findings showed that the integration of learning scenarios with the proposed wireless handheld system could improve students’ Chinese reading comprehension proficiency.

Placement tests, along with the growing interest in their validation, have become increasingly important in English as a Second Language programs. To this end, the present paper illustrates procedures in designing a placement test and using it to evaluate students’ language ability by means of statistical analysis. 29 participants from three proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and adva...

Although filling the gap in reading comprehension gained momentum with the rise of the top-down approach, Vygotsky’ concept of scaffolding and the dual code  theory provided a strong support for the use of paratext to enhance comprehension. Scaffolding is dependent on other-regulation, one type of which is object-regulation. From this vantage-point, various types of paratext can function as sou...

We bring together knowledge from two different types of language learning data, texts learners read and texts they write, to improve linguistic complexity classification in the latter. Linguistic complexity in the foreign and second language learning context can be expressed in terms of proficiency levels. We show that incorporating features capturing lexical complexity information from reading...

The study reported herein assessed levels and patterns of concurrent correlations for Listening Comprehension (LC) and Reading Comprehension (RC) scores provided by the Secondary Level English Proficiency (SLEP) test with direct measures of ESL speaking proficiency (interview rating) and writing proficiency (essay rating), respectively, and (b) the internal consistency and dimensionality of the...

The research reported here examined the relative effectiveness of semantic mapping, as an interactive pre-reading strategy, on reading comprehension of Iranian undergraduate students (non-EFL majors). It also examined whether there was an interaction between gender and the effect of teaching semantic mapping strategy on reading comprehension. The participants in this study consisted of 120 male...

The present study was undertaken to investigate the impact of comparative critical reading strategy on the writing ability of Iranian learners who were learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In order to carry on the study, 60 participants (25 males and 35 females aged between 19 to 27) at intermediate level of language proficiency were randomly assigned to two groups; that is, the experi...