{"id":8043,"date":"2022-03-31T16:08:39","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T14:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/perso.uclouvain.be\/magali.paquot\/?p=8043"},"modified":"2022-03-31T16:09:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T14:09:59","slug":"postdoctoral-fellowship-at-the-intersection-of-corpus-linguistics-language-assessment-and-second-language-acquisition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/perso.uclouvain.be\/magali.paquot\/postdoctoral-fellowship-at-the-intersection-of-corpus-linguistics-language-assessment-and-second-language-acquisition\/","title":{"rendered":"Postdoctoral fellowship at the intersection of Corpus Linguistics, Language Assessment and Second Language Acquisition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Centre for English Corpus Linguistics<\/em> (Language and Communication Institute, UCLouvain, Belgium) has an opening for a postdoctoral fellowship for a period of two years, starting May \u2013 July 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The position is part of a research project directed by Dr. Magali Paquot and funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS): Adaptive Comparative Judgment for large-scale proficiency rating in L2 research: task conditions and their impact on reliability and validity<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project focuses on the construct of proficiency in Learner Corpus Research. Though proficiency is one of the most important constructs in Second Language Research, its measurement has not always received the attention it deserves, and practices of proficiency level assignment have been the subject of continued criticism. In many learner corpora, proficiency is still operationalized in ways that are widely regarded as unreliable (e.g. institutional status). While some learner corpora improve on the current state of the art by including text-based proficiency scores, the time and cost difficulties typically associated with analytical scoring means that it is often absent from, or operationalized in unreliable ways, in currently available large-scale learner corpora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main objective of the research project is to investigate whether Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ), a method used in educational assessment, can be used for reliable and valid large-scale proficiency rating of learner corpora. The project will examine the effect of judges\u2019 language assessment training and expertise, as well as of text features such as topic and length, on the reliability and validity of ACJ tasks. It will also analyze the relationship between the linguistic characteristics of learner texts and how they are rated in ACJ tasks. Answering a call for more research into CJ validity, the project will also collect and analyze the judges\u2019 justifications that underpin their selection of one text above the other, and examine correlations between ACJ rank orders and CEFR levels of learner texts in learner corpora such as the International Corpus of Learner English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See for more details about the origin of the project: Paquot, M., Rubin, R. & Vandeweerd, N. (in press 2022). Crowdsourced Adaptive Comparative Judgment: A community-based solution for proficiency rating. Language Learning 72(3). [article available upon request]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Job description<\/u><\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activities that the postdoctoral fellow will perform include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n