Final Seminars of Fall 2018-2019 Term

The sixth and final of Faculty of Education Fall 2018-2019 Faculty Seminars will be Dr. Aylin Ünaldı's work titled "Automatic text analysis and its use in L2 reading and writing research" on December 21, 2018. The language of the presentation will be English, and it will be held at EF 506 at 13:00 pm. The abstract of the work is given below.

Abstract:

Thanks to advances in computational linguistics and corpus studies, several features of written texts can easily be analysed through the use of computer software designed to investigate textual complexity. These programs can process large amount of data in a fast and efficient way to yield a variety of textual complexity statistics. In several studies, these have been shown to reflect text difficulty levels quite accurately in relation to the designated grade levels in a certain corpus of texts (Benjamin, 2012). Based on sophisticated methods of Latent Semantic Analysis, more cognitively oriented approaches can run analyses on numerous deeper textual features such as propositional density and argument overlap (cohesion and coherence). This talk will review automatic texts analysis research and its use in L2 reading and writing assessment research. Based on literature, we will discuss whether certain criteria on the textual features might be determined to help and guide test developers. When criterial ranges are available, we will question whether they are generalisable across contexts without any L1 and L2 distinction.

Monday, 17 December 2018