Various computer tools have been developed to support educators’ assessment of student writing, including automated essay scoring and automated writing evaluation systems. Research demonstrates that these systems exhibit relatively high scoring accuracy but uncertain instructional efficacy. Students’ writing proficiency does not necessarily improve as a result of interacting with the software. ...

This study examines second language (L2) syntactic development in conjunction with the effects such development has on human judgments of writing quality (i.e., judgments of both overall writing proficiency and more fine-grained judgments of syntactic proficiency). Essays collected from 57 L2 learners in a longitudinal study were analyzed for growth and scoring patterns using syntactic complexi...

Learning to speak foreign language requires more than knowing its grammatical and semantic rules. Speaking a language is especially difficult for foreign language learners because effective oral communication requires the ability to use the language appropriately in social interaction. This paper examines these aspects, so that teachers can more effectively help adult learners developing their ...

Title of Document: CONTRIBUTIONS OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, MOTIVATION, AND STRATEGIES TO KOREAN COLLEGE STUDENTS’ L2 WRITING DEVELOPMENT Soo Eun Chae Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Professor Patricia A. Alexander, Department of Human Development The current study examined Korean college students’ L2 writing development and performance, motivation, and strategies while taking ESL writing clas...

This paper compares human and LSA-based coherence ratings of 223 essays written by learners of English as a foreign language at various levels of linguistic proficiency. While the LSA-based ratings correlate positively – as expected – with a measure of lexical variety, a negative correlation was found between these ratings and the human grading. This is interpreted as resulting from specific wr...

background: the comprehension processes are often inferred or explored indirectly through the assessment of the performance of the students on certain tasks. comprehension is typically measured by the techniques in which the test-taker reads a short text and then selects the correct answers in multiple choice questions, true/false and yes/no tasks or matching activities. purpose: a new approach...

this writing may be of interest to those involved in content and language instruction in bilingual education, immersion, and esl programs, to those who believe that the mainstream elt has focused on how well learners learn and teachers teach, and almost overlooked the equally important question of how well learners learn to use it for learning. this writing is, more specifically, to be of inter...