13. Towards Systematic and Sustained Formative Assessment of Causal Explanations in Oral Interactions

Slater, Tammy; Mohan, Bernard

doi:10.21832/9781847692672-015

Cited by 5 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…This builds on a number of studies that have emphasised the importance of key KSs for knowledge building (e.g. Early, Thew, & Wakefield, 1986;Slater & Mohan, 2010). Classification plays a fundamental role in experiential learning, helping learners to expand their repertoires of knowledge by subsuming meanings into categories and classes (Piaget, 1926).…”

Section: Knowledge Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

Gleason

Slater

2016

Language, Culture and Curriculum

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Second language (L2) classroom research has sought to shed light on the processes and practices that develop L2 learners' abilities [Nunan, D. 2004. Task-based language teaching. London: Continuum; Verplaetse, L. 2014. Using big questions to apprentice students into language-rich classroom practices. TESOL Quarterly, 179, 632-641; Zeungler, J., & Mori, J. 2002. Microanalyses of classroom discourse: A critical consideration of method. Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 283-288]. Honing in on the micro-level of classroom tasks and even further into the language of the tasks can help to reveal the patterns in teacher-and student-talk that help scaffold students' academic literacy. Literacy, from a systemic functional view of language learning, entails having the tools to function in the social contexts that are valued in students' lives. This study illustrates how grounded ethnography was used in conjunction with functional discourse analysis to illuminate bi-literacy development in two third-year university Spanish writing classes. Findings uncovered unique patterns of tasks and oral interactions that helped build students' academic bi-literacy. While grammar tasks helped build students' knowledge of wording-meaning relationships, culture and writing tasks supported their evolving understanding of how language construes content. This study puts forth a systemic functional curricular model for literacy-based tasks that aims to bridge the previously observed language-content gap. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Section: Knowledge Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

Gleason

Slater

2016

Language, Culture and Curriculum

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“…The developmental path of cause, initially proposed at a conference by Mohan, Slater, Luo, and Jaipal (2002) to illustrate the findings of a corpus-based causal discourse analysis of two encyclopedias targeted for different age and education levels, and later described in more detail in Slater and Mohan (2010), arranges linguistic features typical in causal discourse into hierarchical order and "supports the validity of judgments that rate one performance of causal discourse over another" from a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective (Slater & Mohan, 2010, p. 261). The SFL framework, on which the developmental path of cause is based, has the potential to resolve the dilemma in contemporary language assessment between assessing content and assessing language simultaneously (Mohan, Leung, & Slater, 2010).…”

Section: The Developmental Path Of Cause and A Functional Theory Of Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, a pressing question is how AWE systems, including AWE scores, can be used to achieve more desirable learning outcomes, and in particular how AWE as a pedagogical tool can be brought into the L2 writing classroom in ways that aim to "strike a balance between form and meaning" (Chen & Cheng, 2008, p. 108). Different from the previous literature that has investigated how AWE scores were implemented in classes and how students and instructors perceived the use of AWE scores, this study proposes an approach to validating/ justifying AWE score use in classrooms by drawing upon theoretical formmeaning connections proposed by Slater and Mohan (2010), with what they refer to as the developmental path of cause. Before we describe the developmental path of cause, we will briefly review the literature on instructor-machine agreement and AWE score use in the classroom context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using the Developmental Path of Cause to Bridge the Gap between AWE Scores and Writing Teachers’ Evaluations

Slater

2015

Writing & Pedagogy

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Supported by artificial intelligence (AI), the most advanced Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have gained increasing attention for their ability to provide immediate scoring and formative feedback, yet teachers have been hesitant to implement them into their classes because correlations between the grades they assign and the AWE scores have generally been low. This begs the question of where improvements in evaluation may need to be made, and what approaches are available to carry out this improvement. This mixed-method study involved 59 cause and effect essays collected from English language learners enrolled in six different sections of a college level academic writing course and utilized theory proposed by Slater and Mohan (2010) regarding the developmental path of cause. The study compared the results of raters who used this developmental path with the accuracy of AWE scores produced by Criterion, an AWE tool developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the grades reported by teachers. Findings suggested that if Criterion is to be used successfully in the classroom, writing teachers need to take a meaning-based approach to their assessment, which would allow them and their students to understand more fully how language constructs cause and effect. Using the developmental path of cause as an analytical framework for assessment may then help teachers assign grades that are more in sync with AWE scores, which in turn can help students gain more trust in the scores they receive from both their teachers and Criterion. Disciplines Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Language and Literacy Education Comments This is a manuscript of an article published as Ma, Hong, and Tammy Slater. "Using the Developmental Path of Cause to Bridge the Gap between AWE Scores and Writing Teachers' Evaluations." Writing & Pedagogy 7 (2015). 10.1558/wap.v7i2-3.26376 Posted with permission.

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“…x ABSTRACT Making explanations is a very important communicative function in academic literacy; several disciplines including science are dominated by causal explanations (Mohan & Slater, 2004;Slater, 2004;Wellington & Osborne, 2001). For academic success, students need to write about causes and effects well with the help of their instructors, which means that formative assessment of causal discourse is necessary (Slater & Mohan, 2010). However, manual evaluation of causal discourse is time-consuming and impractical for writing instructors.…”

Section: Shakespearementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The major role of causal explanations in academic literacy requires students to be able to speak and write about causal relations for academic success at every level of school. Slater and Mohan (2010) argue that teachers can help learners construct more sophisticated causal explanations through formative assessment. Formative assessment is "related to teaching and learning" and it is concerned with giving learners "locally focused, continuous feedback" on their writing (Leki, Cumming, & Silva, 2008, p. 82).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systemic functional perspective on automated writing evaluation: formative feedback on causal discourse

Sarıcaoğlu

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13. Towards Systematic and Sustained Formative Assessment of Causal Explanations in Oral Interactions

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

Using the Developmental Path of Cause to Bridge the Gap between AWE Scores and Writing Teachers’ Evaluations

A systemic functional perspective on automated writing evaluation: formative feedback on causal discourse

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