Organisational quality of ESL argumentative essays and its influence on pre-service teachers’ judgments

• Main Authors: Cristina Vögelin, Thorben Jansen, Stefan D. Keller, Nils Machts, Jens Möller
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2020-01-01
• Series: Cogent Education
• Subjects: organisation; cohesive devices; paragraphing; second language writing; writing assessment
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2020.1760188

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers’ judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality influences teacher judgments of ESL student texts in order to obtain a comprehensive overview of important determinants in the assessment process. Pre-service English teachers (N = 53) in Switzerland and Germany assessed four argumentative essays of two different overall text qualities in which two organisational features had been manipulated in terms of cohesive devices and paragraphing. Findings show that texts with higher organisational quality were assessed more positively concerning all analytic scales than texts with low organisational quality, indicating halo effects. In addition, an interaction effect was found between overall text quality and organisational quality, suggesting that the effect of organisational quality was stronger when overall text quality was low. This study sheds new light on the interaction between individual text features in the assessment of complex learner texts. Practical implications regarding essay assessment in teacher education are discussed.