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The Standards Tests are a first step towards a permanent large-scale secondary-level system-monitoring programme commissioned by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. The aim of this programme is diagnosis, not selection. Currently, the target group is pupils in grade 8 in grammar schools [Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schulen (AHS)] and secondary schools [Allgemeinbildende Pflichtschulen (APS), i.e. former Hauptschulen].
In May 2006 a sample of approximately 8,000 pupils in 90 pilot schools from all over Austria was tested in the receptive skills of Reading and Listening. In May 2007, about 6,000 pupils were tested in Reading and Listening, and 500 of these pupils were also tested in the productive skill of Writing. In May 2008 the Speaking test completed the E8 Standards Tests. 
The E8 tests have been developed at LTC by a team of experts working with a group of item writers, who are all practising teachers teaching pupils at grade 8 in AHS and APS. LTC has been responsible for item screening, archiving, pilot testing including item analysis, test construction and analysis of the results for the entire population, as well as communicating relevant aspects of the results to different groups of stakeholders (test takers, teachers, school principals, teacher trainers, educational authorities, and the ministry).
In May 2009 a baseline study was conducted in the course of which 10 percent of all Austrian pupils in grade 8 were tested in Reading and Listening, and a certain percentage of these in Writing and Speaking as well. The psychometric analysis of the E8 baseline study will be done by LTC.
In the future the E8 Standards Tests will take place every three years.
With regard to research, LTC has compiled validation reports for the E8 Listening and Writing Test which were published in fall 2009.

PROJECT SUMMARY

The dominant role of English as a global lingua franca which is taught as a foreign or second language in almost every country has fuelled an increasing interest in both practical and theoretical issues regarding English language proficiency, including how to evaluate it. In this spirit, nationwide standardized testing has finally come of age in Austrian schools, with investigations into test validity and reliability helping to ascertain what a test measures in what context and how well it does so, and also making the whole testing procedure more objective. One form of validation involves collecting authentic performances which are subjected to linguistic analysis yielding statistical data. These can then be related to the ratings which the performances were awarded by trained raters.

Our project proposes to do precisely that while focusing on the writing skills of Austrian pupils as produced in the first nationwide educational standards tests. Based on approximately 20,000 long and short writing samples generated by around 10,000 pupils aged 14 to 15 and collected in the E8 baseline study in 2009, our research will initially focus on the following three issues:

· What are the statistical properties of norm adequate linguistic features in the written manifestations of Austrian English learner language amongst the population of 14-year-old pupils?

·  What are the statistical properties of non-norm adequate linguistic features ('errors') in the manifestations of Austrian English learner language amongst the population of 14-year-old pupils?

· Which of these features predict in a statistical sense the ratings awarded to the writing samples by the trained raters on the four dimensions of Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Grammar and Vocabulary? 

However, in order to access the desired information, the handwritten performances must be transformed into a more user-friendly form, namely into a language corpus. Language corpora are large, machine-readable collections of natural language whose main purpose is to serve as a representative basis for the extraction of linguistic data in a statistically meaningful way. The 1.7 million-word learner language corpus that will be constructed within the project will also be annotated for all the relevant features that characterize L2 writing skills, both good and bad. The practical and theoretical ramifications of our research questions will be of great interest to society, education and interdisciplinarity, above and beyond the immediate benefits for language learning, teaching and testing.

Project Director:

Prof. Dr. Günther Sigott

Principal Investigators:

Mag. Dr. Hermann Cesnik 

Mag. Nikola Dobrić

Mag. Jutta Götzinger

Mag.a Dr.in Helen Heaney B.A.

Mag. Florian Pibal, B.A

Supporting Staff:

Thomas Hainscho

FIELDS OF RESEARCH

PROJECT SUMMARY

Der mündlichen Kommunikation im beruflichen Kontext wurde innerhalb der internationalen Gesprächsforschung in den vergangenen Jahren zunehmend Beachtung geschenkt. Formate wie Coaching und Supervision, ein gleichsam auf der Meta-Ebene angesiedelter Spezialtyp berufsbezogener Gespräche, sind dabei weitgehend unerforscht geblieben. Diese Beratungsformate haben jedoch beträchtlich an Bedeutung gewonnen. Dies zeigt sich an hohen Umsätzen großer Beratungsinstitute, der wachsenden Zahl von Coaches, Supervisoren und Beratern und besonders an der ebenfalls wachsenden Zahl von Aus-, Fort- und Weiterbildungsangeboten in diesem Bereich. Trotz oder vielleicht gerade wegen dieser Vergrößerung des Beratungssektors hat die Gesprächsanalyse mit der Untersuchung der unterschiedlichen Beratungsrichtungen nicht Schritt halten können.

Um die Erforschung besonders dieser neueren Beratungsformen in Angriff zu nehmen, hat sich mit LOCCS (The Linguistics of Coaching, Consulting and Supervision) eine transuniversitäre Gruppe von Forschern konstituiert, die sich insbesondere folgenden zentralen Fragen widmet:

• Stellen Coaching, Beratung und Supervision tatsächlich eigenständige Beratungsformate dar, wie in der Praxisliteratur und auf dem Beratungsmarkt meist behauptet wird?
• Welche empirisch-gesprächsanalytisch festzumachenden kommunikativen Charakteristika weisen sie jeweils genau auf?
• Wie lassen sich die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse in die Beratungspraxis zurückspielen (z.B in der Form von gesprächsanalytisch fundiertem Training)?
• Wie können sie in die laufende Debatte um eine Professionalisierung des Sektors sowie um Qualitätsstandards in Beratung und Beratungsweiterbildungen einfließen? 

Auf den folgenden Seiten erhalten Sie einen Überblick über die Prämissen, Ziele und zentralen Fragestellungen von LOCCS, die bisherigen Ergebnisse der Forschungsgruppe mit ihren einzelnen Teilstudien sowie das zugrundeliegende Basis-Korpus MUCCCSI.

INVESTIGATOR: Ass.-prof. Dr.in Eva-Maria Graf

Corpus of Advanced Academic Writing in L2 in Austria

PROJECT SUMMARY

The aim of CAARLA is to validate selected aspects of the assessment procedures used in the Department of English and American Studies, building on existing work on standardization and contributing to our ongoing endeavours to ensure fairness and objectivity when grading students' assignments, and to statistically establish agreement on what constitutes an appropriate standard of English for the Department's graduates. As a basis for validation, a corpus of students' work of between 0.5 and 3 million words will be assembled comprising three main types of text:

a)   the written component of the high-stakes "Fachprüfung", the final language examination taken in both the BA and teaching programmes, which is graded by a commission of three people;

b)   written components of language classes (homework, portfolios and examinations) which are graded by the lecturer; and

c)   assignments such as portfolios, proseminar and seminar papers, which are submitted by students in linguistics, literature and culture courses and graded by the lecturer.

This corpus will be analysed quantitatively in relation to chosen grammatical and vocabulary features, such as use of complex structures (i.e. focusing devices, marked word order, expressions of modality) and breadth and depth of vocabulary, while error tagging in a subsequent development phase will enable us to confirm (or reject) our hypothesis on the intuitive awareness we teachers have of our students' general strengths and weaknesses, ultimately leading, it is hoped, to an increase in learner proficiency, and contributing to work on validating the scale in use for assessing writing at university level.

Start of the research: 01.09.2011

Final report: 01.03.2012

Project Director and Principal Investigator

Dr. Helen Heaney, Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik

Principal Investigator

Mag. Nikola Dobrić, Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik 

FIELDS OF RESEARCH

- applied linguistics

- L2 writing

- corpus linguistics

A recurring problem in modern lexicography, as well as in the development of machine translation tools, information retrieval, information extraction, intelligent human-computer interface, question answering, bioinformatics and applied linguistics, is the identification of prototypical senses of polysemous words, the degree of sense distinctiveness and the structure of the lexical network. The goal of the research done within the project is to explore a method of solving such problems by combining lexical semantics and computer linguistics. The emphasis is foremost on the cognitive approach to sense identification and computational linguistic processing of language.

Start of the  second stage of research: 01.09.2011

Final report: 01.09.2012

Project Director/Principal Investigator:

Mag. Nikola Dobrić

Supporting Staff

Thomas Hainscho

FIELDS OF RESEARCH

- natural language processing

- corpus linguistics

- computational linguistics

- semantics and cognitive semantics

- lexicology