Staff Lead researcher Dr Ying Zheng PhD Associate Professor Research interests Psychometrics and test validation; Human scoring vs. machine scoring; Statistics in applied linguistics; Comparative Judgement in language testing Mandarin exams in the UK school system, including A-Level and GCSE exams; Mandarin Chinese teachers’ professional development Learner motivation and language teaching pedagogy; ESL/EFL learner characteristics and test performance Connect with Ying Email: ying.zheng@soton.ac.uk Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups Centre for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research Our research focuses on language learning and teaching, linguistic theory, and second language acquisition.