Squaring the Circle of Alternative Assessment in Distance Language Education: A Focus on the Young Learner

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please see attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you for your time and valuable feedback. I have attended to all your points and have attached my response here. 

Thank you again. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Author,

Online alternative assessment is an interesting topic. While reading the manuscript I had some suggestions/comments and I would like to outline them here. I also noted some of these comments down on the manuscript. I hope that they will be useful.

1. Reliability and validity of online alternative assessment: It would be a good idea to explain the alignment between the alternative assessment procedures and the course content/learning outcomes. There is limited (no) information about the course content and how assessment adresses course content. Provide evidence as to validity of the assessment tasks/procedures. How reliable is the assessment? What measures are taken to ensure this?
2. Teaching program: How many contact hours were there? What kind of materials were used? Which A(syrnous) means?
3. Informed consent: How were ethical procedures dealt with? Did their parents provide consent? Did students provide consent? I read one line in the manuscript stating that the researcher was given permission to observe the classes. How did you deal with validity threats (e.g. kids acting unnaturally (active/passive) because there is an observer)
4. Literature review about online alternative assessment: Lit review does not seem to cover how alternative assessment is dealt with in online teaching for the YLs. I would like to make the same suggestion for emergency remote teaching and assessment- more up-to-date research evidence about ERT and YL would enrich the lit review section as well as following discussion. Also "core challenges of speaking skills and vocabulary development" for YLs are mentioned but not discussed in the literature review (especially with reference to online learning)
5. I think you forgot to erase some guidelines (external text) in your manuscript; See page 5 line 194- 208 & page 1 lines 27-36
6.  In line 243-245 piloting is mentioned. Can you please elaborate on this? How? what kind of modifications are done?
7. Research questions: Research Q 2 can not be answered based on the data. Consider revision
8. Emerging themes: Can you please provide examplars to coding and illustrative quotations/statements? To illustrate what is the difference between responses ratings and effort ratings? If you can provide a table and outline it would be self explanatory for the readers
9. Observations: were the observations classroom observations or observations of the assessment procedures?
10. Implications: Please add implications
11. A suggestion: You can finish with further research in order to conclude on a more positive note

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you for your time and feedback. I have attended to your comments and have attached my response here. 

 

Thank you again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I have not been able to understand this whole paragraph "The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance. The current state of the research field should be carefully reviewed and key publications cited. Please highlight controversial and diverging hypotheses when necessary. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the principal conclusions. As far as possible, please keep the introduction comprehensible to scientists outside your particular field of research. References should be numbered in order of appearance and indicated by a numeral or numerals in square brackets—e.g., [1921] 1955), (Berry and Smith 1999), (Cojocaru et al. 1999) or Driver et al. (2000). See the end of the document for further details on references"

The hypoteses are well stated but the section on distance assessment and Alternative assessment are short and rather superficial considering that this is the main topic of the research. On top of that, little is said on the international context for alternative assessment during the pandemic. It is self-evident that the author uses an old research because a good deal of papers have addressed that topic in the last two years. 

The context does not deal at all with the real contextual information but a set of ideas around language education. 

 

The beginning of page 5 has no sense at all either

"The Materials and Methods should be described with sufficient details to allow others to replicate and build on the published results. Please note that the publication of your manuscript implicates that you must make all materials, data, computer code, and protocols associated with the publication available to readers. Please disclose at the submission stage any restrictions on the availability of materials or information. New methods and protocols should be described in detail while well-established methods can be briefly described and appropriately cited."

 

The research section lacks the info to get to know where the data were collected. 

 

The conclusions are also unclear and lead nowhere. 

 

The appendix should be after the final bibliography

 

All in all. The author should consider that the instruction for each section are not a part of the paper and that academic style, at the beginning, while hard, it requires the support of senior profs or researchers to read the manuscript before submitting it.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you for your time and feedback. I have attended to all your points and have attached the response here. 

 

Thank you again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Some more theory about observation can be added.

The paper relates alternative assessment to online assessment of young learners, which is rather underinvestigated, and thus very interesting and challenging, and can help FL teachers plan and implement their assessment processes.
The research questions are clearly posed and addressed in the paper and the conclusion consistent with the arguments.
Although literature is updated, more theory about observation as an alternative assessment form has to be added together with the tools of recording information about the students' performance, esp. for the specific research. That means that the criteria which observation was based on have to be elaborated. To that end, some more relevant bibliography and research are expected to be added and commented on/compared to.
The language is academically appropriate and the text coherent; some editing is necessary as the guidelines of the template have not been removed. 
Regarding the implications and shortcomings, future research does not concern only a larger scale study, but research on other factors that affect young learners' classroom and online learning. Thus the merit of the present study could be presented in more detail, which means what the added value of online learning and assessment is in contrast to observing learners in situ.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you for your time and feedback. I have attended to all your points and have attached the response here.

 

Thank you again. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised version is a clear improvement to the original version. The authors have taken most comments into consideration and made some useful additions and modifications to the text.

I wish them the best with their work and paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for attending the earlier comments.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper has significant composition and grammar problems. Just to mention an example, one of the first sentences "practi-tioners have been in limbo regarding assessment with Young Learners (YLs) in the virtual learning environment as they are left with minimum guidance and evidence on what can be applicable and effective in their new context." presents, at least, three major grammar issues that make very difficult the comprehension of the paper. Another case of lack of revision can be found in the word "ap-plied" and later "inter-viewed" which are also a part of the introduction.

What is "For the needs of the study,"? Do you mean methodology?

There is a referent missing when the authors speak about "Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)", who coigned this term?