essay scoring systems have been made available (PEG;Page 1966; e-rater®Burstein et al., 1998; Intelligent Essay AssessorTm;Foltz, Kintsch, and Landauer 1998; and, Intellimetric TM ; Elliot, 2003). In addition, based on the demands of users of the automated scoring technology, tools have been developed that perform more detailed evaluations of student writing. One such application is Critique Wr...

This study investigated the impact of writing checklist on composing descriptive essays among EFL learners at the intermediate level. Sixty participants were assigned to experimental and control groups. Both groups were given a pre-test of writing a descriptive essay including 150 words. The experimental group used checklist for learning while the control used teacher correcting technique in ea...

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students’ perspectives on writing difficulties of essays. was conducted in explanatory research which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from web-based questionnaire semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. 21 undergraduate students have enrolled survey 6 them invited to interview section. reveals students'...

The present study aimed to find out thematic organization and progression in the argumentative writing of Iranian learners of English, representing two levels of language proficiency, and the introduction section of published Research articles (RAs) of Applied Linguistics. For this aim, 60 articles were downloaded from three journals and also 92 MA and BA students majoring in English Language T...

A diverse student population is a relatively recent feature of the higher education system in the United Kingdom. Consequently, it may be thought that more "traditional" types of assessment based around essay writing skills for science undergraduates may be of decreasing value and relevance to contemporary students. This article describes a study in which the process of feedback on, and associa...

We describe in this paper an automated method for assessing local coherence in short argumentative essays. We use ideas from Centering Theory to measure local coherence of essays’ paragraphs and compare it to human judgments on one analytical feature of essay quality called Continuity. Paragraphs which correspond to a discourse segment in our work and which are dominated by one prominent concep...

In EFL programs, rating scales used in writing assessment are often constructed by intuition. Intuition-based scales tend to provide inaccurate and divisive ratings of learners’ writing performance. Hence, following an empirical approach, this study attempted to develop a rating scale for elementary-level writing at an EFL program in Saudi Arabia. Towards this goal, 98 students’ essays were sco...

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze role cohesion rhetorical structure undergraduate EFL students. Hence, 13 three-stage argument were analyzed on preset framework analysis. Discourse analysis...

We investigated whether students increased their self-assessment accuracy and essay scores over the course of an intervention with a writing strategy intelligent tutoring system, W-Pal. Results indicate that students were able to learn from W-Pal, and that the combination of strategy instruction, game-based practice, and holistic essay-based practice led to equivalent gains in selfassessment ac...