Evaluating the Development of Children's Writing Ability in an EFL Context

Reflecting on assessing young foreign language learners

“…With an increasing number of young EFL learners being subject to language assessments, learners’ test performances over an extended period of time have become available, allowing researchers to analyze young EFL learners’ performance longitudinally. For example, Bae and Lee (2012) reported a study in which they investigated how 8–12-year-old Korean EFL students’ writing skills developed over a year and a half. They observed that young EFL learners’ developmental trajectories in writing were not uniform across the multiple components of writing ability in their study context.…”

Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian and Swedish Young Learners’ Written Production in EFL - Descriptions and Comparisons of Their Use of Vocabulary

“…In a study on 42 Korean children aged 9 to 12 and practicing writing in EFLina315 hours long program called English for Young Learners (EYL) and tested three times, the results showed great improvements in a linear progression. The results were varying but remarkable across all the components investigated (Bae & Lee 2012). In a Swiss study on young learners" writing in EFL and teachers" teaching styles, the conclusion is that progress in the skill of writing in EFL is associated with some teacher factors and that in order to be successful in writing, learners need to start early with activities such as copying and letter-writing (Loder Buechel 2015).…”

Quantitative Approaches for Analyzing Longitudinal Data in Second Language Research

“…Typically, these studies report how many participants dropped out or are excluded from the study, but they do not indicate who those participants are, how they compare to those who remained in the study, why they dropped out, or whether and how attrition and data missingness affect the findings and conclusions of the study. The most common approach to dealing with missing data in these studies is excluding participants with any missing data using listwise 5 or pairwise deletion (e.g., Bae & Lee, 2012). This method is simple but assumes that the data are missing completely at random (MCAR), a strong and untenable assumption in most longitudinal studies (Bijeleveld et al, 1998; Ross, 2005; Taris, 2000; van Gelderen et al, 2007).…”

“…While RM ANOVA views measurement occasion as a within-subjects independent variable with as many levels as occasions, MANOVA treats each measure at each occasion as a separate dependent variable (Bijeleveld et al, 1998; Twisk, 2003; Weinfurt, 2000). Three studies were identified that used MANOVA to analyze data collected at two or more time points on more than one dependent variable from the same participants (Bae & Lee, 2012; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010; Yasuda, 2011). Yasuda (2011) seems to have used MANOVA because the study included multiple dependent variables, rather than because each variable was measured more than once.…”

“…Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) used RM MANOVA to assess change in five indicators of metacognitive knowledge over time (before, during, and after an intervention) among 106 learners of L2 French. Bae and Lee (2012) provide a detailed account of the use of MANOVA to analyze longitudinal data. Bae and Lee measured the English writing abilities of 42 children participating in an L2 program three times (at 9-month intervals) to examine L2 writing development over time in terms of various indicators (e.g., grammar, coherence, spelling).…”