Innovative assessment tasks for academic English proficiency: an integrated listening-speaking task vs. a multimedia-mediated speaking task

Language testing researchers and test developers have long preferred to use integrated tasks due to their authentic nature. However, such presumed authenticity is taken for granted without empirical justification. Therefore, in this study, I examined and compared the authenticity of two integrated task types, a speaking task following an audio lecture on an academic topic and a multimedia-mediated speaking task (MMST)—a similar task to the integrated listening-speaking task (ILST), but with a video lecture as its stimulus. First, I used a questionnaire to analyze student perception of 1) situational authenticity regarding the task characteristics of the two assessment tasks compared with those of a target language use (TLU) task in the academic context and 2) interactional authenticity regarding the involvement of language ability in accomplishing the two assessment tasks. Second, as another way to analyze the interactional authenticity, I investigated if language ability, consisting of language knowledge and strategic competence, was used as defined in the construct of the ILST and the MMST. For the language knowledge analysis, I collected student speech samples and analyzed them from a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective. For the strategic competence analysis, I conducted stimulated recall interviews to obtain students’ strategic behavior reports. Ninety-three international undergraduate and graduate students participated in the study. Students perceived a similar degree of situational and interactional authenticity of both the ILST and the MMST overall. In addition, both the ILST and the MMST functioned well in eliciting some SFL features of the target language knowledge. However, some other SFL features were elicited more successfully by the MMST than by the ILST. For strategic competence, students in both the ILST and the MMST groups reported a frequent use of communication, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies. However, students in the MMST group reported a more frequent use of cognitive strategies than those in the ILST group. These findings lead to an enhanced understanding of how the two types of integrated assessment tasks work on student performance and can provide empirical evidence for the domain definition inference of a validity argument for an academic English proficiency test

Proactive educational reforms in South Korea: Schools for Improvement and multicultural education

Introduction This paper discusses the educational issues and societal changes that have led to proactive reforms in the education system of South Korea. Korean pupils achieve high academic levels, but there have been some criticisms relating to sociocultural issues. In addition, Korea is being transformed into a multicultural society. Here we consider two examples of Korea’s educational interventions, introduced in response to contextual demands and societal changes: firstly, the Schools for..

Fundamental Limits on Data Acquisition: Trade-offs between Sample Complexity and Query Difficulty

We consider query-based data acquisition and the corresponding information recovery problem, where the goal is to recover $k$ binary variables (information bits) from parity measurements of those variables. The queries and the corresponding parity measurements are designed using the encoding rule of Fountain codes. By using Fountain codes, we can design potentially limitless number of queries, and corresponding parity measurements, and guarantee that the original $k$ information bits can be recovered with high probability from any sufficiently large set of measurements of size $n$. In the query design, the average number of information bits that is associated with one parity measurement is called query difficulty ($\bar{d}$) and the minimum number of measurements required to recover the $k$ information bits for a fixed $\bar{d}$ is called sample complexity ($n$). We analyze the fundamental trade-offs between the query difficulty and the sample complexity, and show that the sample complexity of $n=c\max\{k,(k\log k)/\bar{d}\}$ for some constant $c>0$ is necessary and sufficient to recover $k$ information bits with high probability as $k\to\infty$

The Influence of Consumer Experiences on Store Choice Criteria and Patronage Intention: the Case Study of SPA brands

Based on an array of economic and social data as well as business trends, Pine and Gilmore (1999) agree that current consumers are concerned with engaging experiences rather than just buying goods and services. Pine and Gilmore (1999) conceptualized this new focus of consumer demand as the emerging “Experience Economy” (EE). This perspective views experiences as enhancing consumer value beyond that derived from goods and services. Pine and Gilmore (1999) proposed four experience realms of EE—entertainment, educational, escapist, and esthetic

Deux projets éducatifs en Corée du Sud : les Écoles du progrès et l’Enseignement multiculturel

Introduction Cet article aborde les problématiques éducatives et les changements sociétaux qui ont entraîné des réformes dans le système éducatif sud-coréen. Les élèves coréens obtiennent des résultats scolaires élevés, mais certaines problématiques socio-culturelles ont suscité quelques critiques. À cela s’ajoute le fait que la Corée est en train de se transformer en une société multiculturelle. Nous examinerons ici deux exemples de projets éducatifs mis en place en Corée pour s’adapter aux..