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Title
The Study of Rater Effects in the
EFL Speaking Assessment
Presenter
Ying-Ying Chuang
ABSTRACT
Foreign language speaking assessment usually employs human raters to judge language learners’ language proficiency by scoring their performance. Therefore, the role of the raters is important in the assessments process: not only their subjective judgment impacts the scores obtained, but their reliability also influences the meaning and quality of the scores. Some relevant previous research studies have examined the relationship between raters and test scores in ELL oral proficiency tests, and in which most of their findings indicated that raters’ background differences did affect their rating behaviors in certain aspects.
This paper focuses on four specific sections as factors of rater effect categories: the gender factor, the rater’s native language factor, the rater’s academic background factor, and the rater training factor. The results of the study show that the raters’ features somehow cause a certain degree of impact on test score differences, especially that the raters’ academic background factor reaches statistically significant differences: the overall holistic scores rated by the raters with linguistics or literature major backgrounds were significantly much stricter than the raters with TESOL/ESL backgrounds and other major backgrounds. In other words, the results and findings did provide the evidence to support that the rater effects are the influencing factors in English language learners’ scores of oral proficiency assessment. Some implications for English teachers regarding oral testing in EFL classrooms are included.
Keywords: foreign language speaking test; background factors, language assessment, rater effects.
Ying-Ying Chuang is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Foreign
Languages, Cheng Shiu University, Taiwan. She holds Ed. D. in Bilingual Education
from Texas A&M University, USA. She currently teaches the courses of English Reading and Writing, English Instruction for Children, and ESL Teaching Methodologies. Her
research interests include foreign language assessment and instructions in the EFL classroom.
contact asian_efl_journal@yahoo.com
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