Investigating the Psychometric Impact of Negative Worded Items in Reading Comprehension Passages with a 3PL Cross-Classified Testlet Model

Negative worded(NW)items used in psychological instruments have been studied with the bifactor model to investigate whether the NW items form a secondary factor due to negative wording orthogonal to the measured latent construct,a validation procedure which checks whether NW items form a source of construct irrelevant variance(CIV)and hence constitute a validity threat.In the context of educational testing,however,no such validation attempts have been made.In this study,we studied the psychometric impact of NW items in an English proficiency reading comprehension test using a modeling approach similar to the bifactor model,namely the three-parameter logistic cross-classified testlet response theory(3PL CCTRT)model,to account for both guessing and possible local item dependence due to passage effect in the data set.The findings indicate that modeling the NW items with a separate factor leads to noticeable improvement in model fit,and the factor variance is marginal but nonzero.However,item and ability parameter estimates are highly similar between the 3PL CCTRT model and other models that do not model the NW items.It is concluded that the NW items introduce CIV into the data,but its magnitude is too small to change item and person ability parameter estimates to an extent of practical significance.

A Brief Analysis of the Key Points to Avoid Misunderstanding and Inappropriate Language Expressions in Business Communication

Opportunities for business cooperation have been increased dramatically in the new environment, and under such circumstance, language usage in business communication places a significant role, particularly in oral business language. To promote harmonious conversations, certain factors and manners of communication like paying attention to the cultural differences, the proper use of humor, mutual understanding, and the avoidance of misunderstanding ambiguity should be taken into consideration to avoid an unsuccessful result.

College Students’Quest for Lexical Study and Application

What every brick is for grande building,vocabulary is for the foundation laid for the acquisition of one language.It follows that authentic expressions are justified by the mastery of its application in a specific context.Therefore,it is crucial to delve into the process of vocabulary acquisition,that is,the effect of students’input and output.Words’meanings varied in distinct contexts.Starting from the above two aspects,this paper illustrates the understanding of learning words through examples,so as to optimize the word learning method to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

On the Scope of Negation in English

This paper deals with the scope of two types of English negation： the modal negation and the non-modal negation. It points out the possibility of ambiguity by reflecting the negative scope through word order in some structures and discusses the special features of these structures.