Native Language and Dialect

Naismith et al. (2018) [pdf]

• a model that measures L2 learners’ lexical sophistication with the frequency list based on the native speaker corpora
• Arabic-speaking learners are rated systematically lower across all levels of English proficiency than speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
• Level 5 Arabic-speaking learners are unfairly evaluated to have similar level of lexical sophistication as Level 4 learners from China, Japan, Korean and Spain .
• When used on ETS corpus, “high”-labeled essays by Japanese-speaking learners are rated significantly lower in lexical sophistication than Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Spanish peers.

Loukina et al. (2019) [pdf]