samples of participants’ writing were scored by two raters using toefl writing scoring rubric. the readability index of each text was calculated through the use of six readability formulae and graphs, i.e., flesch-kincaid index, reading ease index, fog index, smog formula, fry’s graph, and dale-chall readability index. the scores given to each essay were later compared to the obtained readabili...

The purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of EFL learners in an academic writing task. Two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing ins...

Ukrainian undergraduate students face challenges in demonstrating high-level proficiency most of their academic writing. As an integral part achievement, writing skills are essential for success at the various levels students’ future career paths. Thus, literacy has raised considerable attention to teaching English as a second language. This study explores competence level 90 first-year Compute...

This study investigates the roles of cohesion and coherence in evaluations of essay quality. Cohesion generally has a facilitative effect on text comprehension and is assumed to be related to essay coherence. By contrast, recent studies of essay writing have demonstrated that computational indices of cohesion are not predictive of evaluations of writing quality. This study investigates expert r...

This essay reports part of the results of a questionnaire investigating 74 college students’ self-evaluation of their writing behaviors and beliefs on the macro discourse level. Then it moves on to analyze the statistics obtained about students’ macro-level writing behaviors and beliefs in terms of making an outline, writing a thesis, providing topic sentences and making conclusions and the pur...

I recall being a proud young academic about 1970; I had just received a research grant to build and study a scientific database, and I had joined CODATA. I was looking forward to the future in this new exciting discipline when the head of my department, an internationally known professor, advised me that data was “a low level activity” not suitable for an academic. I recall my dismay. What can ...

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall Humor component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also scored for overall writing quality by human raters, which correl...

We present an evaluation of the Writing Pal (W-Pal) intelligent tutoring system (ITS) and the W-Pal automated writing evaluation (AWE) system through the use of computational indices related to text cohesion. Sixty-four students participated in this study. Each student was assigned to either the WPal ITS condition or the W-Pal AWE condition. The W-Pal ITS includes strategy instruction, game-bas...