The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Paula Winke
If you self-assess your language proficiency, I will trust your scores! Coming to terms with measurement error in language testing
Location: Schoenbaum Hall 220
Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Paula Winke
A language test is often viewed as a measurement event whose scores are hard to refute. Indeed, there is a science and a craft behind language testing, making them seem infallible, but tests also do always have a certain amount of measurement error. Measurement error is normal. In this talk, she will discuss why measurement error is there, and what it looks like. We will take a nice, hard look at different sources of measurement error and divide them between sources we can do something about (to lessen measurement error), and those we cannot do anything about (because the error is inherent in the properties of the assessment event). We also review consequences of measurement error, which, she will showcase, can range from the absurdly humorous, to the tragically morbid. Toward the end of the talk, she will ask language teachers in the room to consider adopting a relatively error-prone language test: a self-assessment of speaking proficiency. We will discuss what the self-assessment can do, and what it cannot do, and weigh the pros and cons of its use. Thus, the overall goal of this talk is for teachers to be able to estimate measurement error in their language tests, and then adjust score uses accordingly.
If you have time before the talk, please read Winke, Zhang, and Pierce’s open-access article “A closer look at a marginalized test method: Self-assessment as a measure of speaking proficiency,” currently in-press in Studies in Second Language Acquisition: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263122000079. The self-assessment Dr. Winke will showcase in the talk is based on the research that went into the SSLA paper.
Professor Paula Winke is the Director of the Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. She is the 2021 recipient of the ACTFL-NFMLTA/MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in World Language Education, the 2020 American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Research Article of the Year Award, the 2012 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research, and the 2009 Outstanding Article of the Year Award from the CALICO Journal. She is an advisor to the United States Foreign Service Institute on foreign language proficiency testing. Paula teaches courses on language assessment, individual differences in SLA, and research methods in applied linguistics. She also likes to run and eat ice cream.