Research on L2 Writing Assessment Based on a'Learner Corpus

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The purpose of the present study is to explore significant rating criteria and development indices that could be used for assessing L2 (a second language) writing abilities appropriately. As a first step, argumentative essays in English produced by Japanese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) college students were collected and compiled as a learner corpus. These essays were all analytically rated by two native speakers of English.Two kinds of correlation analyses were then performed using rating scores: 1) a correlation analysis between the total scores and their analytical sub-scores in the corpus and 2) a correlation analysis between the total scores and some quantitative values (such as the essay length, average sentence length, and average word length) automatically computed from the essay data. Our findings show that analytic scales "Content" and "Language Use" are significantly correlated with the total score of the essay and that the essay length is also significantly correlated with the total score of the essay. The significantly positive correlation between the total score of the essay and the student's English proficiency was also observed.Since the size of our newly-developed corpus is small, the findings we obtained are not generalizable across all Japanese EFL learners. However, the present research seems to point to a new line of learner corpus-based L2 writing assessment research. The findings from future research are expected to provide some useful insights into classroom teaching of L2 writing.