The Comparability of Direct and Semi-direct Oral Proficiency Interviews in a Foreign Language Context : A Case Study with Advanced Korean Learners of English

The comparability between oral proficiency interviews (OPI) and semidirect oral proficiency interviews (SOPI) has been an important issue since the advent of the SOPI as an alternative to the OPI. This study examines whether the two test modes can be considered to elicit comparable performance in a foreign language test context. 15 advanced Korean learners of English were given two oral proficiency tests consisting of a matched set of tasks: one under a simulated OPI and the other under a simulated SOPI. The resulting test scores and performance samples were compared. The results showed that the scores and the performance samples from the two test modes were highly comparable. This comparability is an encouraging result since the SOPI is more practical to administer than the OPI, especially in a foreign language context

Structural Equation Modeling Reporting Practices for Language Assessment

Studies that use structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques are increasingly encountered in the language assessment literature. This popularity has created the need for a set of guidelines that can indicate what should be included in a research report and make it possible for research consumers to judge the appropriateness of the interpretations made from a reported study. This article attempts to fill this void by providing a set of reporting guidelines appropriate for language assessment researchers

Structural Equation Modeling Reporting Practices for Language Assessment

Studies that use structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques are increasingly encountered in the language assessment literature. This popularity has created the need for a set of guidelines that can indicate what should be included in a research report and make it possible for research consumers to judge the appropriateness of the interpretations made from a reported study. This article attempts to fill this void by providing a set of reporting guidelines appropriate for language assessment researchers.This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Language Assessment Quarterly on 2015, available online: http:// www.tandf.com/10.1080/15434303.2015.1050101</p

Conceptual Retrieval based on Feature Clustering of Documents

In the Web search, since users&apos; queries usually consist of only a few words, it is hard to identify their information needs. To solve this problem, many approaches have tried to expand initial queries and to reweight the terms in the expanded queries using users&apos; relevance judgments. Although relevance feedback is most effective when relevance information about retrieved documents is provided by users, it is not a fully automatic method. Another solution is to use correlated terms for query expansion. The main problem with this approach is how to construct the term-term correlations that can be used effectively to improve retrieval performance. In this study, we try to construct query concepts that denote users&apos; information needs from a document space, rather than to reformulate initial queries using the term correlations and/or users&apos; relevance feedback. To make query concepts, we extract features from each document, and cluster the features into primitive concepts that are used to form query concepts. Experiment is performed on a TREC collection

Kinase signaling pathway regulates sleep quantity and depth through a distinct population of excitatory neurons

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