Summary writing assessment concerns persist regarding its reliability, validity, and practicality in educational settings, as evaluating various abilities and skills complicates the process. Therefore, this investigation aimed to examine the rating strategies and awareness of assessing summaries written by Japanese university students, focusing on raters with diverse backgrounds, such as native or non-native English speakers and novices or experts.

The study results show that some items did not provide sufficient reliability among experienced raters, even with adequate training. In contrast, it produced higher reliability among inexperienced ones. Furthermore, rating agreements and score decisions did not differ by raters' native language. Instead, these differed depending on the raters’ experience. However, no significant differences were found among the raters’ strategies during the evaluation.

As part of an ongoing project, researchers created a formative speaking assessment tool. Research suggests a clear and succinct rubric is critical to any speaking assessment in the EFL classroom. The project’s analytic rubric helped first-year university students practice and improve their speaking skills. Though learning outcomes were achieved, the evaluation results of the previous cohort tended to range toward the high end. This prompted researchers to review the rubric. Research questions: 1) How did editing and revising the rubric affect student results? 2) How did editing and revising the rubric increase student confidence? This study collected data from student grades and surveys. The findings showed that after introducing the newest version of the rubric, student grades were centered around the average, expected results. Researchers concluded that the use of the revised rubric improved students’ English-speaking skills and confidence.

Learners’ self-assessment encompasses a true learner-centered approach and underscores the importance of involving learners in assessing their performance to develop proficiency and foster autonomy. In monitoring their learning strategies, skill development, study habits, and motivation, learners are positioned to understand which areas need attention. Using online self-assessment with Google Forms is a fast and simple way for learners to monitor their learning that is easily incorporated into instruction with little preparation. Additionally, self-assessment develops learners' critical thinking, as it involves evaluating the quality of their thinking and actions. The development of autonomy, along with critical thinking, positively enhances learners' motivation and achievement. The presenters share how EFL learner self-assessment using Google Forms can be incorporated into instruction increasing collaboration among instructors and students.

Summarizing is a language device that we all use daily to communicate our experiences and learned knowledge with others. However, it can be a difficult skill to acquire and master for language learners. This workshop will provide hands-on experience in how to prepare materials and train students to improve their summarizing skills for both listening/speaking and reading/writing. Using question-types based on the Pearson Benchmark Test, we will show techniques for improving students’ scores and how these skills apply to a much wider, richer context in real-world language use. Workshop participants will collaborate with presenters to create practice materials and learn about a variety of delivery methods for students to use both in class and at home.

This study looked into the pragmatic competence of 320 university ESL students in making requests and apologizing in the assumption that speech acts can be taught and assessed. Using Liu's Multiple Choice Completion Test, results revealed that females scored higher than males on request and apology items. However, their scores failed to reach a 50% rate, with the discrimination and difficulty indices suggesting that the tests' difficulty was an intervening factor. Since males and females had incredibly close mean scores on request items, the difference is insignificant ruling out the assumption that females are more adept at making requests than males. There is, however, a significant difference between their mean scores in apology items. In light of these findings, it is recommended that gender's influence on pragmatic competence be examined, validity of the Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test be assessed and strategy training be incorporated into speech acts lessons.

Research in a variety of contexts suggests that parental involvement is correlated with children’s educational success; however, studies are lacking that evaluate the relationships between English private tutoring (EPT), parental involvement, and students’ academic performance. To address this gap, this paper investigates the effects of parental involvement on the academic attainment of Taiwanese students with a focus on the breadth of EPT. Data from the Taiwanese national college entrance exams in 2017 and 2018 were collected to obtain and design a pretest–posttest control group. Based on the results of a two-stage least squares regression analysis, the findings revealed that parents’ private tutoring (PT)-related activities, parent–school contacts, EPT, and self-learning were significantly associated with students’ increased academic gains in comparison to certain dimensions of parental involvement, such as discussions between the parents and their child/children and the monitoring of the child/children by the parents.