Scholars have given little attention to testing's influence on the outcomes of university English preparatory programs (UEPP). Variations on the two main classifications of writing evaluation, the holistic and the analytic were examined. The objectives were to identify the assumptions for inclusion of writing in UEPPs, analyze the skills and…

The study identified the performance of Grade 7 students enrolled in Umingan Central National High School across their academic performance in English under creative writing skill. In gathering the profile of the students and their performance in identifying morphological and syntactical errors, descriptive and correlational research designs with…

Calls for multimodal communication, information, and technology literacy have come from the National Council of Teachers of English (Comprehensive Literacy, 2013), the National Communication Association (High School Communication Education, 2012) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (Ehrmann, 2004). In response, several…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

In order to benefit from feedback on their writing, students need to engage effectively with it. This article reports a case study on student engagement with computer-generated feedback, known as automated writing evaluation (AWE) feedback, in an EFL context. Differing from previous studies that explored commercially available AWE programs, this…

This paper presents an investigation of score prediction based on natural language processing for two targeted constructs within analytic text-based writing: 1) students' effective use of evidence and, 2) their organization of ideas and evidence in support of their claim. With the long-term goal of producing feedback for students and teachers, we…

Writing essays and receiving feedback can be useful for fostering students' learning and motivation. When faced with large class sizes, it is desirable to identify students who might particularly benefit from feedback. In this article, we tested the potential of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for identifying poor essays. A total of 14 teaching…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

There is a large body of research on the effectiveness of rater training methods in the industrial and organizational psychology literature. Less has been reported in the measurement literature on large-scale writing assessments. This study compared the effectiveness of two widely used rater training methods--self-paced and collaborative…

The aim of this paper is to describe the different approaches applied to teaching writing in the L2 context and the way these different methods have been established so far. The perspectives include a product approach, genre approach and process approach. Each has its own merits and objectives for application. Regarding the study context, it may…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in the writing assessment scores for each of the four traits--development, focus and organization, language, and conventions--as measured by the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) of students who had a formal keyboarding course compared to those who did not. A…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the third of the three recommendations: Use assessments of…

The use of collocation has always been considered as a good yardstick by which the idiomaticity of second language (L2) use is reliably judged. Hence, this study aims at investigating the relationship between optimizing the lexical approach and improving the collocational accuracy and the ability to operate on the idiom principle in the writing of…

Although the ESL Composition Profile (CP) has been widely used by scholars as a well-balanced rubric for learner essay evaluation, it is not necessarily easy for L2 teachers to rate students' essays based on the five criteria of the CP. This indicates the necessity to explore reliable alternatives to the CP. This article, therefore, compares three…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental writing patterns of English as a foreign language (EFL) students across different score levels through a TOEFL Junior® writing task. The sample of this study comprised 2,016 young adolescent EFL students, ranging from 10 to 15 years old, who took the TOEFL Junior test. We performed a…