How Faculty Attitudes and Expectations Toward Student Nationality Affect Writing Assessment

Lindsey, Peggy; Crusan, Deborah J.

doi:10.37514/atd-j.2011.8.4.23

Cited by 23 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…These distinctions result in unique histories, needs, interests, experiences, and linguistic backgrounds that affect diverse groups of students in terms of their writing behaviors and performance. This assertion is supported by Graham’s (2018) writer(s)-within-community model and other scholarly studies (e.g., Fan et al, 2019; Lindsey & Crusan, 2011; Tan et al, 2022). Consequently, our study includes students’ demographic characteristics as controlling variables, going beyond linguistic and register-related factors, to account for the influence of sociocultural and linguistic differences on actual writing scores.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Writing Quality Predictive Modeling: Integrating Register-Related Factors

Wang,

Troia

2023

Written Communication

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The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers—narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned automated writing evaluation models in three conditions: (1) register-related factors alone, (2) linguistic features alone, and (3) the combination of these two. A total of 1006 essays ( n = 327, 342, and 337 for informative, narrative, and opinion, respectively) written by 92 fourth- and fifth-graders were examined. A series of hierarchical linear regression analyses controlling for the effects of demographics were conducted to select the most useful features to capture text quality, scored by humans, in the three registers. These features were in turn entered into automated writing evaluation predictive models with tuning of the parameters in a tenfold cross-validation procedure. The average validity coefficients (i.e., quadratic-weighed kappa, Pearson correlation r, standardized mean score difference, score deviation analysis) were computed. The results demonstrate that (1) diverse feature sets are utilized to predict quality in the three registers, and (2) the combination of register-related factors and linguistic features increases the accuracy and validity of all human and automated scoring models, especially for the registers of informative and opinion writing. The findings from this study suggest that students’ register knowledge and register-specific motivation add additional predictive information when evaluating writing quality across registers beyond that afforded by linguistic features of the paper itself, whether using human scoring or automated evaluation. These findings have practical implications for educational practitioners and scholars in that they can help strengthen consideration of register-specific writing skills and cognitive and motivational forces that are essential components of effective writing instruction and assessment.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Writing Quality Predictive Modeling: Integrating Register-Related Factors

Wang,

Troia

2023

Written Communication

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“…Proficiency in English is often a requirement for professional advancement, such as publishing in high-impact journals, receiving international grants, and participating in international conferences (Hwang 2005 , Clavero 2010 , Huttner-Koros and Perera 2016 , Ramírez-Castañeda 2020 ). Non-Anglophones are therefore under constant pressure to improve their English language skills (Tardy 2004 , Lindsey and Crusan 2011 , Corcoran 2015, Suzina 2021 ), which can be a source of anxiety and an emotional burden (Ramírez-Castañeda 2020 , Amano et al 2021b ). Moreover, this challenge is not experienced equally across English learners but, rather, weighs particularly heavily on learners whose dominant language is highly divergent from English and on learners from regions in which English-language instruction or media are not widely available, two issues that are not mutually exclusive.…”

Section: The Costs Of a Single Universal Language In Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

et al. 2022

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Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language also creates barriers to accessing scientific careers and knowledge. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we describe how, when, and why to make scientific literature more readily available in multiple languages through the practice of translation. We broadly review the advantages and limitations of neural machine translation systems and propose that translation can serve as both a short- and a long-term solution for making science more resilient, accessible, globally representative, and impactful beyond the academy. We outline actions that individuals and institutions can take to support multilingual science and scientists, including structural changes that encourage and value translating scientific literature. In the long term, improvements to machine translation technologies and collective efforts to change academic norms can transform a monolingual scientific hub into a multilingual scientific network. Translations are available in the supplemental material.

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“…lower on evaluations than those of English-as-a-first language (Eng1st) students due to evaluators' implicit bias (Huang, 2008;Lindsey & Crusan, 2011;Milnes & Cheng, 2008) and students' challenges communicating their knowledge (Lyon, Bunch, & Shaw, 2012;Swanson, Bianchini, & Lee, 2014;Wolf et al, 2008). As Kieffer et al (2009) write: "language plays an integral role in most, if not all, academic learning, any test of academic achievement is also, to some degree, a test of language ability" (Kieffer, Lesaux, Rivera, & Francis, 2009).…”

Section: Eng1stmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of language in students’ justifications of scientific phenomena

Deng

Rahmani

Flynn

2022

Preprint

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Making decisions and constructing arguments with scientific evidence and reasoning are essential skills for all members of society, especially in a world facing complex socioscientific issues (climate change, global pandemics, etc.). Argumentation is a complex linguistic practice, but little is known about how students from diverse language backgrounds engage in argumentation. The goal of this study was to identify how students’ English language proficiency/history was associated with the reasoning demonstrated in their written arguments. We found that students with lower English proficiency and less English history produced fewer causal responses compared to students with higher English language proficiency and history. Follow-up interviews with fifteen participants revealed that students’ comfort communicating in English on assessments depended on a combination of general and academic language experiences. Findings suggest a need to identify what barriers students from diverse language backgrounds encounter during argumentation to ensure students from all language backgrounds have equitable opportunities to demonstrate their abilities.

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How Faculty Attitudes and Expectations Toward Student Nationality Affect Writing Assessment

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Writing Quality Predictive Modeling: Integrating Register-Related Factors

Writing Quality Predictive Modeling: Integrating Register-Related Factors

Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

The role of language in students’ justifications of scientific phenomena

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