Toward Establishing Criteria for Evaluating Paragraph Writing of Pre-Intermediate Learners of English

Abstract

Japanese students’ lack of English writing skills has been a long-standing problem. It not only originates from students’ lack of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, but also from the availability of fewer opportunities to write essays in English. Further, the current standards for evaluating the essays written by Japanese beginner-level learners in English are not established sufficiently, resulting in a heavy grading burden on the teachers. This study establishes an evaluation standard to assess the English essays written by Japanese beginner-level English learners. An “analytic scoring” is conducted for each essay, involving criteria ranging from level 1 to 4, while another group of evaluators perform a “holistic scoring”, judging the quality based on their overall impression, on a scale from 1 to 4. The reliability and validity of the “analytic scoring” are established through the correlation analysis of both evaluations. Text mining is used to analyze the explanation of reasons provided by the holistic scoring evaluators to the highest-rated essays and identify the factors determining the quality of English writing.