Contact Information
4080 Foreign Language Building, MC-168
707 S. Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Interests
Language testing and assessment
English for academic purposes
Educational measurement
Quantitative research methods
Research Description
My research broadly focuses on speaking and writing assessment. My specific research interests include scale development and validation, rater behavior and training, assessment literacy for language teachers, and test score use in educational settings.
Education
Ph.D., English (Second Language Studies), Purdue University, 2015
M.A., TESOL, Ohio State University, 2009
B.A., English, Wuhan University, China, 2008
Grants
2015-2016, SPAAN Research Grant, CaMLA (with Shelley Staples, University of Arizona); Project: Investigating lexico-grammatical complexity as construct validity evidence for the ECPE writing tasks: A multidimensional analysis.
2016-2018, British Council Aptis Assessment Research Grant (with Ha Ram Kim, UIUC, and Ji Young Kim, UCLA); Project: Complexity, accuracy and fluency features of speaking performances on Aptis across different CEFR levels
2018-2019, IELTS Research Grant, British Council / IDP: IELTS, Australia (with Shelley Staples, University of Arizona); Project: Investigating the cognitive and social aspects of IELTS speaking performances across proficiency levels: Comparing the CAF-based and register-linguistics- based analyses
Courses Taught
EIL 460 Principles of Language Testing
LING 489 Theoretical Foundations of Second Language Acquisition
EIL 411 Introduction to TESL Methodology
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Associate Professor, Educational Psychology
Associate Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Associate Professor, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Recent Publications
Yan, X., & Chuang, P. L. (2023). How do raters learn to rate? Many-facet Rasch modeling of rater performance over the course of a rater certification program. Language Testing, 40(1), 153-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/02655322221074913
Chuang, P. L., & Yan, X. (2022). An investigation of the relationship between argument structure and essay quality in assessed writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 56, [100892]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2022.100892
Dimova, S., Yan, X., & Ginther, A. (2022). Local tests, local contexts. Language Testing, 39(3), 341-354. https://doi.org/10.1177/02655322221092392
Lei, Y., & Yan, X. (2022). An Exploratory Study of Strategy Use on Elicited Imitation Tasks. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, [917168]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917168
Ho, E. C., & Yan, X. (2021). Using community of practice to characterize collaborative essay prompt writing and its role in developing language assessment literacy for pre-service language teachers. System, 101, [102569]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102569