At secondary level, great importance is put in teaching and assessment on the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of text types. For the Austrian school system, descriptions of text ...types for German, English, French, Italian and Spanish are available. However, the text types differ across languages. This study focuses on English. It uses a set of 23 descriptive statements, derived from text linguistic theory, to empirically investigate their suitability to characterise the constructs held by practicing teachers for eight text types for L2 English. This approach has already been applied to German as the language of instruction (Sigott et al. 2020) and can be applied to all other languages. The results for English show that the suitability of the 23 statements varies considerably across text types. A subset of statements turns out to be suitable as dimensions for comparing all the English text types. In addition, statements are identified which are suitable to characterise individual text types and statements which should not be considered in describing text types and, therefore, not used in formulating assessment criteria. This is valuable information for teaching and relevant for assessment practice. These results are presented in a polarity profile for each text type.
Task difficulty is an important but complex phenomenon in Applied Linguistics, for which there is relatively little empirical research. This article discusses approaches to defining task difficulty ...and focuses on objective task difficulty derived from ratings of performances and on difficulty derived from an error count in the performances, thus taking errors as indicators of writing task difficulty. Errors are described in terms of the Scope–Substance error taxonomy in writing performances from the Slovene General Matura examination in English. The most frequent errors are located at word and phrase level. Generally, error frequency decreases as writing proficiency increases, but some error types do not conform to this trend. This is the case for punctuation errors, which gain prominence at higher levels of mastery. The results of this study are relevant for assessment, particularly for rating scale development or revision, and for rater training. They are equally relevant for teaching, since knowing sources of difficulty in tasks is a prerequisite for effective pedagogical action. More generally, if applied to performances based on a wider range of tasks, viewing errors as indicators of difficulty can lead to a better understanding of difficulty‐generating task features.
Povzetek
Težavnost nalog je pomemben, a zapleten pojav v uporabnem jezikoslovju, o katerem je razmeroma malo empiričnih raziskav. Prispevek obravnava pristope k opredeljevanju zahtevnosti nalog pri preverjanju pisnega sporočanja. Osredinjen je na njihovo objektivno zahtevnost, ki izhaja iz točkovnih ocen pisnih izdelkov in iz števila napak v izdelkih, kar pomeni, da napake obravnava kot kazalec zahtevnosti nalog. Napake opredeli po taksonomiji obseg‐vsebina in jo uporabi za ocenjevanje pisnih izdelkov na izpitu iz angleščine na slovenski splošni maturi. Najpogostejše napake se pojavljajo na ravni besed in besednih zvez; večinoma se njihova pogostnost zmanjša z naraščanjem pisne zmožnosti, vendar nekatere vrste napak ne sledijo temu trendu. Tak je primer napak v rabi ločil, ki so pogostejše na višjih ravneh znanja. Rezultati študije so pomembni za ocenjevanje, predvsem za razvoj in prenovo ocenjevalnih lestvic, pa tudi za usposabljanje ocenjevalcev. Dognanja so pomembna tudi za poučevanje, saj je razumevanje razlogov za zahtevnost predpogoj za učinkovito pedagoško delo. Širše gledano lahko napake uporabimo kot kazalec zahtevnosti tudi pri drugih vrstah nalog in s tem izboljšamo prepoznavanje in razumevanje tistih lastnosti nalog, ki prispevajo k njihovi zahtevnosti.
When administering tests across grades, vertical scaling is often employed to place scores from different tests on a common overall scale so that test-takers' progress can be tracked. In order to be ...able to link the results across grades, however, common items are needed that are included in both test forms. In the literature there seems to be no clear agreement about the ideal number of common items. In line with some scholars, we argue that a greater number of anchor items bear a higher risk of unwanted effects like displacement, item drift, or undesired fit statistics and that having fewer psychometrically well-functioning anchor items can sometimes be more desirable. In order to demonstrate this, a study was conducted that included the administration of a reading-comprehension test to 1,350 test-takers across grades 6 to 8. In employing a step-by-step approach, we found that the paradox of high item drift in test administrations across grades can be mitigated and eventually even be eliminated. At the same time, a positive side effect was an increase in the explanatory power of the empirical data. Moreover, it was found that scaling adjustment can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a vertical scaling approach and, in certain cases, can lead to more accurate results than the use of calibrated anchor items. (Contains 3 figures, 10 tables, and 3 footnotes.)
The findings from a comprehensive study on oral corrective feedback show that the success of such feedback as measured in a subsequent test is affected by its format, the type of error corrected, and ...certain learner characteristics. The most successful format of correction, both for the learners receiving the feedback and for their peers, is feedback successfully eliciting self-correction in practice situations. Among the least successful formats for both groups are recasts without further comments or repetition by the corrected learner. The type of error corrected most successfully differs for the two groups. Those corrected learn most from the correction of their grammatical errors and least from correction of pronunciation errors. Peers score best on pronunciation items and gain least from correction of lexical errors. Of the learner characteristics taken into consideration, verbal intelligence, relative proficiency (within levels at school or university), and the learners’ attitude towards correction proved to be most influential.
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