Syntactic complexity, error and the holistic evaluation of ESL student essays

Abstract

A clause analysis technique designed by Louis Arena (1982) was used in this study to determine syntactic complexity in ESL student essays. A measure of error, the "Correctness Score," devised by Brodkey and Young (1981), was adapted for the purposes of this study.The essay corpus analyzed in this study consisted of thirty ESL student compositions written for a practice Test

An investigation of English spelling problems of Arabic-speaking students

“…In a study of teachers' evaluations of written work. Sparks ( 1988) discovered that the presence of errors in texts influenced readers' scoring of them. Similarly, Charney ( 1984) claims that 6 readers' judgments are affected by errors, and he reports that spelling consistently correlates with holistic scores.…”

“…Charney (l 984) refers to this as a "General Impression Marking" (p. 68). But Sparks ( 1988) observes that this type of scoring:…”