Employing G-theory and rater interviews, the study investigated how a high-stakes writing assessment procedure (i.e., a single-task, single-rater, and holistic scoring procedure) impacted the variability and reliability of its scores within the Turkish higher education context. Thirty-two essays written on two different writing tasks (i.e.,…

This paper proposes to use depth perception to represent raters' decision in holistic evaluation of ESL essays, as an alternative medium to conventional form of numerical scores. The researchers verified the new method's accuracy and inter/intra-rater reliability by inviting 24 ESL teachers to perform different representations when rating 60…

Reflective writing is an important educational practice to train reflective thinking. Currently, researchers must manually analyze these writings, limiting practice and research because the analysis is time and resource consuming. This study evaluates whether machine learning can be used to automate this manual analysis. The study investigates…

This study attempted to discern the factor structure of the achievement goal orientation and goal structure constructs across the domain-specific task of essay writing in an Iranian EFL context. A convenience sample of 116 public university learners participated in a single-session, in-class study of an essay writing sampling and an immediate…

This project focuses on laying the foundations for automated analysis of argumentation schemes, supporting identification and classification of the arguments being made in a text, for the purpose of scoring the quality of written analyses of arguments. We developed annotation protocols for 20 argument prompts from a college-level test under the…

This article presents a novel method, the Complex Dynamics Essay Scorer (CDES), for automated essay scoring using complex network features. Texts produced by college students in China were represented as scale-free networks (e.g., a word adjacency model) from which typical network features, such as the in-/out-degrees, clustering coefficient (CC),…

This study employed a mixed-design approach and the Many-Facet Rasch Measurement (MFRM) framework to investigate whether rater bias occurred between the onscreen scoring (OSS) mode and the paper-based scoring (PBS) mode. Nine human raters analytically marked scanned scripts and paper scripts using a six-category (i.e., six-criterion) rating…

Recent research conducted as part of the English Profile identified grammatical criterial features that are characteristic of each Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency level. The extent to which these criterial features attest in English learners of various first language backgrounds call for an empirical examination. In this…

This article describes the steps we went through in designing and validating an item bank to diagnose linguistic problems in the English academic writing of university students in Hong Kong. Test items adopt traditional item formats (e.g., MCQ, grammatical judgment tasks, and error correction) but are based on authentic language materials…

The present study aimed at characterizing what skilled or more proficient ESL college writing is in the Philippine setting through a contrastive analysis of three groups of variables identified from previous studies: resources, processes, and performance of ESL writers. Based on Chenoweth and Hayes' (2001; 2003) framework, the resource level…

Ghostwriting is difficult to detect, it has the potential to be high quality, and universities do not currently have adequate policies in place to police it. Determining the quality of the ghostwriting services available to tertiary students is of vital importance because underestimating the potential for students to use these services to pass…

The emergence of computer technology in English language teaching has paved the way for teachers' application of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (mall) and its advantages in teaching. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of the face to face instruction with Telegram mobile instruction. Based on a toefl test, 60 English foreign language…

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…

Han's (2009, 2013) selective fossilization hypothesis (SFH) claims that L1 markedness and L2 input robustness determine the fossilizability (and learnability) of an L2 feature. To test the validity of the model, a pseudo-longitudinal study was designed in which the errors in the argumentative essays of 52 Iranian EFL learners were identified and…

As students increasingly rely on digital media to locate information, composition instructors must incorporate into writing instruction critical evaluation of and reflection on students' use of Web content. A growing problem in the composition class is underdeveloped critical digital literacy skills. To become fully literate, students need more…