Search results for "assessment."

To correct or to cooperate : Mediational processes and L2 development

2018

The present article argues for a conceptual distinction between corrective feedback and mediation that emphasizes the status of the latter not as an instructional practice but as a defining feature of human psychology (Vygotsky, 1987) that has direct implications for how instruction might be approached. Specifically, Sociocultural Theory (SCT) posits that humans are always and everywhere mediated, as individuals draw upon meanings and ways of thinking they have already internalized as well as those that are available in their immediate environment to regulate their actions. With regard to second language (L2) education, rather than exclusively focusing on learner independent performance or…

Guiding and assessing development of L2 writing process : the role of peer collaboration

2022

This study, informed by Vygotskian notion of mediation and reporting on a partnership between a researcher (the first author) and a teacher (the second author), aims at exploring how peers’ comments can inform teacher assessment and guidance of learners’ L2 (second/foreign language) writing. The participants were 19 L2 English learners in an upper secondary school in Finland. We largely focus on the notes that one pair of learners made on each other’s essays and how they responded to peer assistance. Triangulating these data with classroom observation and a questionnaire, we traced how learners co-constructed their understanding of how their texts can be developed. The foci and how the iden…

Prosody and fluency of Finland Swedish as a second language: Investigating global parameters for automated speaking assessment

2023

This study investigates prosody and fluency of Finland Swedish as a second language (L2). The main objective is to investigate global measures of prosody and fluency as predictors of overall oral proficiency, fluency, and pronunciation ratings. We analyzed parameters related to temporal fluency, timing (based on syllable durations), and f0 change from spontaneous speech produced by 30 native and 235 non-native speakers of Finland Swedish representing proficiency levels from beginner to intermediate. We used pairwise comparisons to investigate the differences between native speech (L1) and L2 samples from different proficiency levels. To study the predictability of ratings with acoustic para…

Towards the phonetic basis of spoken second language assessment : temporal features as indicators of perceived proficiency level

2017

The role of pause location in perceived fluency and proficiency in L2 Finnish

2022

Fluency is a commonly used descriptor of second language (L2) speaking skills. Unplanned and too frequent pauses, hesitations, and repetitions disrupt the flow of speech and can cause temporal irregularities at all levels of speech hierarchy, from syllable rate to phrasing. However, most studies that attempt to quantify fluency disregard pause locations. The current study investigates, whether and which pause locations affect the perceived fluency and proficiency in L2 Finnish. Several pause parameters were computed from spontaneous L2 Finnish speech samples. Pause locations were investigated with regards to clauses and phrases as well as incomplete words. The effect of pause locations to h…

Developing Automated Feedback on Spoken Performance : Exploring the Functioning of Five Analytic Rating Scales Using Many-facet Rasch Measurement

2022

In this study, we used the Many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to explore the quality of ratings as well as the functioning of five analytic rating scales developed for automated assessment of L2 speech. This study is part of a multidisciplinary research project that develops automatic speech recognition (ASR), automated scoring and automated feedback for L2 Finnish and Swedish. The data include the analytic ratings (task completion, fluency, pronunciation, range, accuracy) gathered from human raters (n=14) who assessed L2 Finnish learners’ (n=64) speech samples using Moodle. The four-facet Rasch analysis showed that the raters performed and the rating scales functioned well, although task …

Predicting Placement Accuracy and Language Outcomes in Immigrants’ L2 Finnish Education

2018

Coherent conditional probabilities and proper scoring rules

2011

In this paper we study the relationship between the notion of coherence for conditional probability assessments on a family of conditional events and the notion of admissibility with respect to scoring rules. By extending a recent result given in literature for unconditional events, we prove, for any given strictly proper scoring rule s, the equivalence between the coherence of a conditional probability assessment and its admissibility with respect to s. In this paper we focus our analysis on the case of continuous bounded scoring rules. In this context a key role is also played by Bregman divergence and by a related theoretical aspect. Finally, we briefly illustrate a possible way of defin…

Service Climate and Display of Employees’ Positive Emotions: The Mediating Role of Burnout and Engagement in Services

2011

This article aims to test a model linking service climate to the frequency of expression of positive emotions by frontline employees. We propose that burnout and engagement at work mediate the relationship between service climate and the expression of positive emotions. Service climate impacts negatively on burnout and positively on engagement; in turn, burnout and engagement are significantly related to the frequency of expression of positive emotions. This model was tested both at the individual and work-unit levels. In addition, it was compared with a direct model that proposes an additional direct link from service climate to frontline employees’ positive emotions. Models were tested th…

Applying the integrated trans-contextual model to mathematics activities in the classroom and homework behavior and attainment

2016

The aim of the present study was to test hypotheses of the trans-contextual model. We predicted relations between perceived autonomy support, autonomous motivation toward mathematics learning activities in an educational context, autonomous motivation toward mathematics homework in an out-of-school context, social-cognitive variables and intentions for future engagement in mathematics homework, and mathematics homework outcomes. Secondary school students completed measures of perceived autonomy support from teachers and autonomous motivation for in-class mathematics activities; measures of autonomous motivation, social-cognitive variables, and intentions for out-of-school mathematics homewo…