Using Coh-Metrix to Analyze Chinese ESL Learners’ Writing

Scoring essays is costly, laborious and time-consuming. Automated scoring of essays is a promising approach to face this challenge. Coh-Metrix is a computer tool that reports on cohesion, sentence complexity, lexical sophistication and other descriptive features at sentenceand paragraph-level. It has been widely used to analyze native English speakers’ essay writing. However, few studies have used Coh-Metrix to analyze essays written by English as a Second Language (ESL) students. In this study, we analyzed the correlation between several Coh-Metrix features combined with a set of newly proposed features and the quality of essays, written by Chinese university students, both English and non-English majors. This study shows that each group of students tends to write essays that have their own signature features. The quality of essays written by English majors highly correlate to the importance of introduction, conclusion and cohesion at the sentence level, while the quality of essays written by chemistry majors are highly related to mechanics errors, sentence complexity and cohesion at the paragraph level.