Academic literature on the topic 'English language Grading and marking (Students)'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1997.<br>Title from title page screen, viewed June 14, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ron Fortune (chair), Doug Hesse, Janice Neuleib, Maurice Scharton. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-201) and abstract. Also available in print.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)<br>Abstract This thesis explores the use of the interpersonal resources of English in argumentative/persuasive essays (APEs) constructed by undergraduate international students from East-Asian regions (EAS), in particular, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and also by Australian-born English speakers (ABS). High-graded essays (HGEs) were compared with the low-graded essays (LGEs) in order to identify the relationship between their deployment of interpersonal features and the academic grades given by markers. In addition, the essays constructed by the EAS writers were compared with those written by ABS writers. A major complaint of academic staff about ESL Asian students concerns their lack of analytical, critical voice and formality in their arguments. The linguistic evidence for this explored in this thesis is based mainly on interpersonal systems of interaction and evaluation recently developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Iedema et al., 1994; Iedema, 1995, 2003, 2004; Martin, 2000a, 2003c; White, 1998, 2004; Martin and Rose, 2003; Macken-Horarik and Martin, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). Within interaction, the thesis draws on work dealing with the metaphorical realisations of commands in a bureaucratic administration context. Evaluation is based on appraisal theory, which is concerned with the linguistic inflection of the subjective attitudes of writers, and also their evaluative expressions and intersubjective positioning. In order to explore the use of interpersonal resources from a perspective of writer and reader interaction, this study incorporates a social interactive model derived from ‘Interaction in writing’ alongside Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) dialogic literacy. Under this broad interdisciplinary approach, the interpersonal aspects in APEs are examined from three main perspectives: Interactive (schematic structures), Interactional (the metaphorical realisation of commands), and InterPERSONAL meanings (the three main appraisal systems: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION). The sample comprised six overseas students and six Australian-born native English speakers. They were all participants in the English for Academic Purposes class in the Modern Language Program offered by a regional university in southern New South Wales. These students were required to write APEs as a part of their course. Discourse analysis was applied to the essays at the genre, discourse semantic and the lexico-grammatical levels. Interviews were undertaken with markers to identify the relationship between text analysis results and markers’ comments on the essays and the grades. The results indicated that students’ use of interpersonal resources is a good indicator for judging quality of APEs. The analysis reveals significant differences in the extent to which HGEs are interactive by showing awareness of audience in argument structure, and making interactional choices focusing on command and interPERSONAL choices of appraisal systems. These differences are reflected in the use both of strategies of involvement by being interactional, and strategies displaying distance by being formal. The differences are also reflected in the presentation of personal opinions by being evaluative and of intersubjective claims supported by evidence. While there were no significant differences between the EAS and ABS writers in terms of the argument structure, ABS texts are more interactional, having a high degree of authority and conviction characterised by a formal tone. ABS writers also display a stronger voice through frequent exploitation of GRADUATION resources of appraisal. Overall, it can be said that while EAS students display problems with raising their own voices in argument, ABS students display problems in supporting persuasion. Educational implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing curriculum design include the desirability of enhancing a context-sensitive approach in writing, raising audience awareness of language teachers in relation to the interpersonal use of English, and promoting the dialogic nature of argument by reconciling individual creativity with social voices and community conventions.

This comparative case study examines how writing teachers comment on basic writing students' papers, how students respond to these comments, and how students take risks in their revising process. Four U.S., four ESOL basic writing students, and four basic writing teachers participated in the study. Three writing samples of the students' choices including drafts, revisions, and final papers were collected, coded, and analyzed to see the amount of risk-taking. Students were asked to complete the Daly and Miller's Writing Apprehension Test along with a Demographic Information Check Sheet. Each student was interviewed three times: once for each writing sample, and each teacher was interviewed once. The study revealed that students in the study appreciated teachers' written comments on their multiple-draft papers, and that teachers' comments, particularly the ones on content and organization, did help improve their writing ability and motivated these students to take risks in trying new ideas in revision. The ESOL writers tend to take fewer risks and regard revision as making lexical changes because of their unfamiliarity with the English usage and writing conventions, while the U.S. writers take more risks and view revision as a recursive process with different levels of attention.The main purpose of the study was to find out what major factors motivated students' risk-taking in their revisions so that writing teachers will be able to provide comments that motivate students to become better writers. This study will contribute to the understanding of what students really think of teachers' written comments.<br>Department of English

<p>This study deals with the testing and grading of Swedish school leaving students’ oral proficiency in English, and with certain aspects of these students’ linguistic competence. The analyses and results are based on material drawn from an assessment project carried out at Gothenburg University in 1993.</p><p>The 29 students taking part in the project were interviewed three times by three different interviewers in tests comprising three tasks, similar in structure but different in content. The interviewers were of three categories: school teachers of English, university teachers of English and native speakers of English. The student production was graded on a five-point scale according to a set of rating criteria.</p><p>The interviewers assigned generally positive but often differing grades to the student performance. The grades were influenced by the students’ ability to communicate and speak with flow, and by gaps in vocabulary and by occurrences of grammatical errors. The students’ use of discourse phenomena and compensatory strategies was also of importance to the grades assigned. Many students were considered to have acceptable intonation and rhythm, but nevertheless an evident Swedish accent. The linguistic features studied comprised the verbal group, vocabulary, discourse markers and pronunciation. </p><p>Differences could be observed between the members of the interviewer categories regarding the grades they assigned to student production. The school teachers seem to have paid special attention to grammatical accuracy, and the native speakers appear to have had a notion of communicative competence where accuracy plays a less important role.</p><p>Differences in the grades assigned could also be explained by the order in which the interviews were made, by some students’ hesitant delivery, by the positive or negative effect of various fillers in the students’ speech, and by the interviewing methods used by the interviewers in the tests.</p>

<p>It is important to think about how to correct an essay and what the students should learn from it. My aim in this paper, is to look into what different researchers have said about feedback on written assignments and carry out a study of the kind of feedback that is actually used in secondary school today – and of what students and teachers think about it.</p><p>The results show that underlining is the marking technique mostly used in the secondary school where I did my investigation. This technique was also mostly preferred amongst the students. Two teachers were interviewed and both said that they used underlining because experience has shown that this marking technique is the most effective one. Furthermore, the results from the essays differed when analyzing errors corrected with complete underlining, partial underlining, crossing out and giving the right answer. One marking technique got good results when dealing with one kind of error, and worse in others. My conclusion is that teachers need to vary their marking technique depending on the specific kind of error.</p><p>Also, the results from a questionnaire showed that most of the students would like to get feedback on every written assignment. Not many of them said that they were already getting it, although this was what both teachers claimed. To conclude, there are many different ways to deal with marking and feedback. The key-word seems to be variation. As long as teachers vary their ways of dealing with marking and giving feedback, they will eventually find one or two that are most effective. Involving the students in this decision can also be a good idea, if they are interested.</p>

This study examines how well the qualities of good essay writing expressed in the British Columbia Ministry of Education's handbook, Using rating scales to evaluate student writing, are transmitted to teachers and students. In asking how well those values are communicated to teachers and students involved in grade twelve English examinations, the study compares the features demonstrated in the writing reference sets and specified in the Holistic scoring guide to the responses of markers, teachers and students who were surveyed concerning their familiarity with those terms and to their beliefs about what constituted a good essay. Most teachers reported instructional practices which utilized these reference sets, and students supported this assertion. The qualities described by teacher-markers such as “command of language, thoughtful, well structured, interesting argument, depth of understanding, engaging, sense of voice” were also compared to salient features of papers which they had just scored and found to correspond quite closely. Students, however, in describing the features they hoped to produce in writing a good essay, did not use the terms of the official rating scale descriptors, but instead, fell back on a vocabulary expressing the most basic features of the process approach to writing, such as “planning, webbing ideas,” and “revising.” Survey instruments used in the study were not sufficiently detailed to provide data on student comprehension of rating scale terms. Observations are made on such aspects of large-scale writing evaluations as recommended scoring practices, the need for thorough marker preparation, the vagueness of some criteria such as “voice”, and on current approaches to high school composition instruction with emphasis on modelling theory as the basis for instruction in a jurisdiction which uses reference sets of student work as standards for its rating scales. Shortcomings of the study are noted and suggestions for future research in this area are offered. The appendices include all survey forms used, results of a feature analysis of over 300 highly-rated examination essays, typescripts of student interviews, and a sample writing reference set with scale-point descriptors.<br>Graduate

Kong, Ying Yuk.<br>Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013.<br>Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-304).<br>Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.<br>Abstracts also in Chinese.