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 human-assessed English proficiency than speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
• Level 5 Arabic-speaking learners are inaccurately evaluated to have similar level of lexical sophistication as Level 4 learners from China, Japan, Korean and Spain .
• When used on the ETS corpus, essays by Japanese-speaking learners with higher human-rated lexical sophistication are rated significantly lower in lexical sophistication than Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Spanish peers.

Loukina et al. (2019) [pdf]

• Models providing automated speech scores on English language proficiency assessment
• L1-specific model trained on the speaker’s native language was the least fair, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers, but not for German speakers
• All models (Baseline, Fair feature subset, L1-specific) performed disadvantageously for Japanese speakers