Assessing the development of English FL writing skills

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Assessing the development of English FL writing
skills

• Pieter de Haan Dept. of English Kees van Esch
  Dept. of Spanish
• University of Nijmegen

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Dr. Pieter de HaanDepartment of
EnglishUniversity of NijmegenP.deHaan_at_let.kun.nl
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Theoretical background

• Communicative competence in writing
• Grammatical competence
• Discourse competence
• Sociolinguistic competence
• Strategic competence

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Theoretical background

• Differences between L1 and L2/FL writing
• Fluency
• Accuracy
• Quality
• Coherence
• Similarities between L1 and L2/FL writing
• Strategies
• Global approach
• Objectives

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Theoretical background

• Learner corpora
• Categories (Polio 2001)
• Assessing development
• Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998)
• Neff et al. (1998)
• Grant Ginther (2000)
• Ortega (2003)

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Project goals

• develop an instrument that can help the teacher
  to assess FL English and Spanish writing progress
  in qualitative and quantitative terms
• learn more about how FL students compose their
  writing both in first versions and in revisions

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Activities planned

• Collecting essays
• 2002
• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• Qualitative and quantitative study of corpus data

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Data collection
Data are collected in March
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Prompt for essays
Students in the departments of English and
Spanish wrote two essays at a one-year interval
- on the same prompt, asking them to select their
preferred source of news and give specific
reasons to support their preference (30 minutes
max.) (cf. Grant Ginther, 2000). The prompt was
given in Dutch. Students were also invited to
spend a further 15 minutes writing down (in
Dutch) how they felt their writing had improved.
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Methodology

• Holistic assessment
• Individual ranking by three independent assessors
• Quantitative analysis of text features
• Average essay length
• Average sentence length
• Average word length
• Type/token ratio

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Basic statistics

• English
• Total essays 66
• Mean essay length 2002 303 words
• Mean essay length 2003 383 words
• Range in 2002133 - 528
• Range in 2003215 - 604

• Spanish
• Total essays 22
• Mean essay length 2002 214 words
• Mean essay length 2003 320 words
• Range in 2002153 - 306
• Range in 2003225 - 453

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Av. essay length (English)
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Av. sentence length (English)
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Av. word length (English)
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Type/token ratio (English)
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Conclusions

• 1 Fluency
• 2 Sentence length
• 3 Word length
• 4 Type/token ratio
• 5 Further analysis