Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants

Rubin, Donald L.

doi:10.1007/bf00973770

Cited by 484 publications

(430 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The first is that it may have low inter-rater reliability. The second issue is that students' evaluations of their ITA's language ability may be impacted by irrelevant, nonlanguage factors (Rubin, 1992). In addition, logistical difficulties may prevent collecting a sufficient number of undergraduate students' evaluations of ITAs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

2008

ETS Research Report Series

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Although the primary use of the speaking section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language™Internet-based test (TOEFL ® iBT Speaking test) is to inform admissions decisions at English medium universities, it may also be useful as an initial screening measure for international teaching assistants (ITAs). This study provides criterion-related validity evidence for the use of TOEFL iBT Speaking for ITA screening and evaluates the effectiveness of using the scores for teaching assistantship (TA) assignment classification.Four universities participated in this study. Local ITA-screening tests or instructor recommendations were used as the criterion measures. Relationships between the TOEFL Speaking test and the local ITA tests were explored through observed and disattenuated correlations. These relationships were moderately strong, supporting the use of the TOEFL Speaking test for ITA screening. However, the strengths of the relationship between the TOEFL Speaking test and the local ITA tests were found to be somewhat different across universities depending on the extent to which the local test engaged and evaluated nonlanguage abilities.Implications of these findings are discussed.Binary and ordinal logistic regressions were used to investigate how effective TOEFL Speaking scores were in separating students into distinct TA assignment categories. At all four universities, TOEFL Speaking scores were significant predictors of students' TA assignments and were fairly accurate in classifying students for TA assignments. ROC curves were used to determine TOEFL Speaking cut scores for TA assignments at each university that would minimize false positives (i.e., true nonpasses classified as passes).The results have considerable potential value in providing guidance on using the TOEFL iBT Speaking scores for ITA screening.Key words: TOEFL iBT Speaking, criterion-related validity, standard setting, cut scores, logistic regression i The Test of English as a Foreign Language™ (TOEFL ® ) was developed in 1963 by the National Council on the Testing of English as a Foreign Language. The Council was formed through the cooperative effort of more than 30 public and private organizations concerned with testing the English proficiency of nonnative speakers of the language applying for admission to institutions in the United States. In 1965, Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the College Board ® assumed joint responsibility for the program. In 1973, a cooperative arrangement for the operation of the program was entered into by ETS, the College Board, and the Graduate Record Examinations ® (GRE ® ) Board. The membership of the College Board is composed of schools, colleges, school systems, and educational associations; GRE Board members are associated with graduate education. The test is now wholly owned and operated by ETS.ETS administers the TOEFL program under the general direction of a policy board that was established by, and is affiliated with, the sponsoring organizations. Members of the TOEFL Board (previously the ...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

2008

ETS Research Report Series

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“…For example, in a vowel-matching task, listeners selected different tokens as being most similar to the one produced by the speaker depending on whether they believed the speaker to be from Detroit or Canada (Niedzielski 1999). More strikingly, listeners found the speech of native English speakers to be more foreign-accented (Babel and Russell 2015;Rubin 1992) and less intelligible (Babel & Russell) when it was presented with a picture of an Asian versus a Caucasian speaker.…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Lev‐Ari

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

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People learn language from their social environment. Therefore, individual differences in the input that their social environment provides could influence their linguistic performance. Nevertheless, investigation of the role of individual differences in input on performance has been mostly restricted to first and second language acquisition. In this paper I argue that individual differences in input can influence linguistic performance even in adult native speakers. Specifically, differences in input can affect performance by influencing people's knowledgebase, by modulating their processing manner, and by shaping expectations. Therefore, studying the role that individual differences in input play can improve our understanding of how language is learned, processed and represented.Keywords: individual differences, social networks, PsychLingvarOne of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to understand how we make sense of incoming input and manage to transform it into meaningful utterances. On the face of it, this is a task that most of us seem to succeed at, yet a closer look reveals great variation in the degree of success at different aspects of the task, from speech perception to the comprehension of pragmatic intentions. So far, the study of individual differences in language processing has mostly focused on differences due to variation in cognitive skills. Much less attention has been devoted to individual differences in the social environment, and in particular, to differences in the properties of the input it provides, especially among adult native speakers. In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of the input that people receive play an important role in shaping their linguistic performance. I will focus on three manners by which input can do so: by influencing the knowledgebase that feeds the analysis of incoming language, by influencing the manner of processing, such as the mechanisms that are relied on and the cues that are attended to during language processing, and by shaping expectations, which, in turn, influence performance. From noise to structured differencesThe realization that individual differences in performance can be informative about language processing and representation and are not merely noise that needs to be reduced has only gained popularity in Psycholinguistics over the last couple of decades. For many decades, experimental studies in psycholinguistics, as well as in other fields, focused on the commonalities, on how people in general perform certain tasks, and how the average participant is influenced by certain manipulations. Individual differences in performance were treated as noise. After all, by definition, participants' score on any task is composed of their "true" score and the measurement error, and so differences might simply be noise. If the experiment is conducted well, the measurement errors should cancel each other, and the general trend would be discovered. It is only in the 90s that the systematicity in this "noise" has started to be explo...

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“…The scant research on university students' acceptance of non-native English-speaking academics similarly indicates that instructors' ethnicity, manifested by a foreign accent as well as by non-linguistic factors such as Asian facial features (Rubin, 1992) can negatively affect teacher ratings and listening comprehension. A recent incident at a leading Australian university provides poignant empirical support that these claims still apply.…”

Section: Previous Lingua-attitudinal Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

International Students’ Attitudes towards Malaysian English Ethnolects

Khojastehrad¹,

Rafik-Galea²,

Abdullah³

2015

ELT

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Language attitudes are learned and formed in our social environment through hearing others referring to certain groups or people's languages and cultures, and also by exposure to particular varieties spoken in the context. This might lead to stereotyping English and its native speakers (McKenzie, 2008). In this sense, it is pedagogically significant to uncover learners' language attitudes towards a target language in order to prevent negative impression towards that certain variety and consequently inevitable communication failure with the members of that particular speech community. The present study explores the attitudes of international students living in Malaysia towards Malaysian English. The main objective was to examine the respondents' attitudes towards the Mesolectal variety of Malaysian English spoken by the three main ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese-Malaysian, and Indian-Malaysian. A matched-guise questionnaire was used to elicit information from the students and obtain their responses towards six samples of Malaysian English accents from both male and female speakers. International students from selected Malaysian universities were asked to listen to the recorded speech samples and were then asked to rate the speakers using 15 bipolar adjectives on a Likert scale which were split into two sections of speaker's style of English speaking and social attractiveness, and finally they were asked to guess the ethnicity of the speakers. The findings show that there is a positive linear relationship between attitude towards the Malaysian English variety spoken by each ethnic group, and the intelligibility of that certain variation, which directly affects the listeners' evaluation of the speaker's social attractiveness too.

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Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants

Cited by 484 publications

References 8 publications

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

International Students’ Attitudes towards Malaysian English Ethnolects

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Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants

Cited by 484 publications

References 8 publications

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

International Students’ Attitudes towards Malaysian English Ethnolects

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Product

Resources

About

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS

INVESTIGATING THE CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL^® SPEAKING SCORES FOR ITA SCREENING AND SETTING STANDARDS FOR ITAS