The Relationship of English Foreign Language Learner Proficiency and an Entropy Based Measure

It is important for education systems to analyze and provide an appropriate level of feedback to meet the needs of learners. Predicting a learner’s proficiency level can be used to inform learner’s about their progress, and can also aid other parts of the characteristic analysis and feedback process, such as: focused analysis on learner proficiency subgroups. In this paper, we propose a measure based on the frequency of words in the sentences produced by learners during speaking exams to predict the learner’s language proficiency. The proposed measure is compared to the learner’s vocabulary size by correlation analysis. The results suggest that there is a stronger correlation between the proposed measure and the proficiency of the learner than the learner’s vocabulary size.