Graduate student Ping-Lin Chuang’s paper (Argumentation structure and quality as validity evidence for integrated writing assessment) was selected for the best presentation award at the 2021 MwALT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) conference, which took place over the weekend of Oct 8th and 9th.

This year, this award was very competitive as the conference was cancelled last year due to the pandemic and there were a lot more papers included in the conference program this year. Nonetheless, Ping-Lin’s paper, which was developed from her qual paper, impressed the entire awards committee as an innovative, well-designed, and well-executed study that utilized the EPT data to identify salient textual features that mark argumentation effectiveness across proficiency levels in second language writing.

Congrats to Ping-Lin and her mentor, Professor Xun Yan!