Instructions for the Paper
on ESL Writing
English 418: Second Language Acquisition
spring 2000
We have examined two sets of essays of written by adult ESL students. We scored the two sets using general
impression marking and primary trait scoring, and performed an error analysis and a t-unit analysis.
You will now write a paper about these two sets of essays by addressing the following topics:
- T-units.
- What relationship did you find between holistic scores and T-unit length?
- Was the relationship what you expected? Explain.
- Holistic scores.
- Primary trait scoring and general impression marking are two types of holistic scoring. What are the
differences between the two types of scoring technique?
- Discuss the situations in which each type of scoring technique could be used appropriately.
- Length of papers.
- What is the normal relationship between length of writing and overall quality as measured by holistic scores
- Did the expected pattern hold for the current papers? Explain.
- Errors.
- Was there a relationship between length of T-units and the number of errors per T-unit?
- What is the expected relationship between the number of errors and the overall quality of writing as measured by holistic scores?
- Did errors correlate highly with holistic scores? Explain.
- What types of errors were most frequent in the writing of the ESL writings?
- Did these errors interfere greatly with the ability of the students to communicate?
- Correlations.
- Examine the correlations between length of T-units, length of paper and frequency of errors on one hand with the two sets of holistic scores on the other.
- Are the sets of correlations similar for the two types of holistic scoring?
- If the correlations are somewhat different, explain.
- Self evaluation.
- What did you learn about the writing of ESL writing from doing this analysis?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses in evaluating writing?
- How can you effectively teach and evaluate writing in a classroom that has both native English speakers and non-native English speakers?
The paper should be double-spaced, typed with a 12 point font, and at least six pages in length.
All papers are due on May 23 without exception. Any late papers will receive the lowest possible passing grade, 60.
English 418: Course Syllabus.