2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Open-source English ability test with automatic grading of speaking and writing
| Project/Area Number |
19K00829
|
|---|
| Research Institution | Kochi University of Technology |
|---|
Principal Investigator |
Bateson Gordon 高知工科大学, 共通教育教室, 教授 (00340018)
|
|---|
| Project Period (FY) |
2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
|
| Keywords | four-skills online test / essay auto-grade / speak auto-grade / open-source |
|---|
| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
(a) The publication entitled "Developing an Online Test to Measure Writing and Speaking Skills Automatically" was reviewed and accepted for publication by the "International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching" (IJCALLT). Expected publication date is October 2021.
(b) Invited to give keynote presentation entitled "Testing 4-skills online: What is possible?" at GLoCALL 2020.
(c) Invited to give keynote workshop entitled "Creating a 4-skills online assessment tool using the Moodle LMS" at GLoCALL 2020.
Unfortunately, the GLoCALL 2020 conference was cancelled due to the Convid-19 pandemic. It has been rescheduled to take place in December 2021, at which time I shall give the keynote presentation and workshop listed above.
|
| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, my time and energy at university was spent converting courses to online delivery, and supporting students and part-time teachers to use to use the new courses.
In addition, the international conferences that intended to participate in, such as GLoCALL, were cancelled, so I had limited opportunity to recruit teachers to collect testing data.
Furthermore, the underlying technology for the Speech to text conversion, namely the Poodle Speech to text API was found to behave unreliably on iPhones thus making it impossible to conduct tests even with my own students.
|
| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
The developer of the Poodle Speech to text API will be contacted to see if the API can be made to work with the latest version of Moodle on iPhones.
At the same time, the Google Speech to text API will be investigated as an alternative to the Poodle API.
|
| Causes of Carryover |
If possible, I intend to travel the the GLoCALL conference to be held in Malaysia in December of 2021.
|
