The goal of this research was to determine the English language writing skills International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) graduating undergraduates based on two linguistic levels; IIUM Proficiency Test (EPT) and Common European Framework Reference for Languages (CEFR), descriptors: IIUM’s EPT descriptor, CEFR’s ‘General range’ descriptor (Council Europe, 2001, p 110). results show that ma...

alternative assessment approaches and, among them, self-assessment and peer-assessment are becoming increasingly important in educational contexts. designed to compare self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment, this study included 90 efl students from 3 intact classes divided into 3 groups: self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment. after taking the toefl proficien...

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...

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...

the present paper investigated the effectiveness of concept mapping as a learning strategy on efl students’ self-regulation (metacognitive self-regulation, time and study environment, effort regulation, peer learning, and help seeking). sixty university students participated in the study. they were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, each including thirty students. they were a...