Research

Future research at LTC will concentrate on the following areas. Students interested in doing M.A. or PhD research in these areas are invited to contact Professor Guenther Sigott (guenther [dot] sigott [at] aau [dot] at) or Professor Nikola Dobric (nikola [dot] dobric [at] aau [dot] at).

M.A. (also ‘Diplomarbeit’)

• How to represent quality of error annotation by reference to inter-annotator agreement?
• Type-to-token ration as a measure of text quality.
• Promiscuity and prevalence of errors as measurements of their relative severity.
• An analysis of Austrian English school textbooks in terms of the competence models for the Austrian English ‘Bildungsstandards’ for Reading and Listening. (several papers possible)
• How do pupils take reading tests? An analysis of the strategies used by pupils when they tackle items in the Austrian E8-Reading tests.
• How do pupils take listening tests? An analysis of the strategies used by pupils when they tackle items in the Austrian E8-Listening tests.
• What is difficult for you isn’t for me! A comparison of teachers’ judgements of item difficulty and empirical item difficulty based on student performance. (2 papers possible)
• The relationship between presumptive item content and empirical item difficulty in the E8 Reading and Listening tests.

PhD

• Algorithmic representation of predictive power of errors in relation to ratings.
• Improvement in objectivity of coding rating-positive features in writing performances.
• Is there context-independent universal quality of a text?
• The relationship between item difficulty and acquisitional sequences. A study of determinants of item difficulty in the E8 Reading tests and acquisitional sequences reported in Second Language Acquisition research.
• The relationship between item difficulty and acquisitional sequences. A study of determinants of item difficulty in the E8 Listening tests and acquisitional sequences reported in Second Language Acquisition research.
• Acquisitional context and success in EFL learning. An analysis of the effect of context variables on performance on the E8 tests of Reading, Listening and Writing.