The study identified the pragmatic competence level of the second language (L2) learners through Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) administered to purposively selected 40 first-year education students. A modified questionnaire based on Survey for Academic English Language Exposure (SAELE) was used to determine the effectiveness of academic…

The rapid decline in Australian students' performance on the "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN) writing test is an issue of national concern. This paper presents the first investigation into patterns of achievement and progress on the NAPLAN writing test across the tested year levels (3, 5, 7 and 9) between…

This article is twofold: (a) it explored the impacts of mediation strategies on promoting cognitive modifiability in a dynamic assessment (DA) writing exam among ESP learners, and (b) it compared test-takers' performance in DA vs. static assessment (SA). The analysis drew on qualitative and quantitative data of a dynamic writing exam of classroom…

Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative…

The purpose of study is to examine the reliability of analytical rubrics and checklists developed for the assessment of story writing skills by means of generalizability theory. The study group consisted of 52 students attending the 5th grade at primary school and 20 raters in Mersin University. The G study was carried out with the fully crossed…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in college developmental writing courses. Prior research that had found large effects on the writing quality for essays without sources was extended to include strategies for critical reading and note-taking, writing summary response…

Researches in general education as well as in language teaching have clearly shown the pivotal role conceptions of learning played on students' learning outcome. However, there are paucity of researches on instructional and assessment schemes that promote deep conceptions of writing. The main objective of this study, therefore, was to examine the…

With the wide introduction of English-medium instruction (EMI) to higher education institutions throughout East Asian countries, many East Asian universities are using English proficiency tests that were not originally designed for this context to make admissions and placement decisions. To support the use of these tests in this new EMI context,…

Given the orthographic complexities of Chinese characters, handwriting skills may play an important role in how children learn to write Chinese. The present study includes a comprehensive battery of handwriting measures in relation to Chinese spelling in young children. Measures of handwriting, including stroke order, visual-motor integration…

This text represents two extracts from a submission to the House of Commons Select Committee's investigation into primary school tests. The first part is a critique of the 2016 tests, particularly the Reading and Grammar tests for 11-year-olds and also the highly regulated "teacher assessment" of Writing. The second part is a set of…

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…

Since the 1970s, legacy Basic Writing systems have survived despite growing resistance grounded in an increasing awareness of their troubling roots and harmful effects. In this article, two 2017 basic writing students and their teacher conduct a mixed-method "postmortem" examination of the now eliminated zero-credit course and writing…

Developing a sufficient level of writing proficiency takes time. It is also a complex skill difficult to measure. The history of writing assessments reveals changing views of construct validity, reliability and interpretation of results. This study used a binary logistic regression model with seven years of grades 3 to 12 annual direct writing…

This study aimed to investigate Thai high school students' reported use of SRL strategies and their self-efficacy and to explore the effects of two psychological determinants in writing performance. Data were gathered from 768 Thai high school students in six high schools located in Southern Thailand. Convenience sampling was used in this study.…

This study examines and compares L2 grammatical accuracy in digital multimodal writing (DMW) and monomodal text-based writing (TBW). Utilizing a mixed-methods design, the research incorporates a dataset comprising 180 written texts, a questionnaire, and text-based interviews. Sixty EFL learners were assigned to two groups (TBW and DMW) and…