Mikyung Kim Wolf

Young Adolescent EFL Students’ Writing Skill Development: Insights From Assessment Data

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental writing patterns of English as a foreign language (EFL) students across different score levels through a TOEFL Junior® writing task. The sample of this study comprised 2,016 young adolescent EFL students, ranging from 10 to 15 years old, who took the TOEFL Junior test. We performed a detailed analysis of student essays to identify possible patterns in the development of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability. Linguistic characteristics, such as lexical, syntactic, and discourse features, as well as organizational and content features specific to the argumentative writing genre, were examined by using automated writing evaluation tools and human ratings. The results of descriptive statistics, significance testing, and regression analyses yielded notable patterns for linguistic accuracy and complexity variables. Certain linguistic and content-related features also were found to be highly associated with the writing quality of the young EFL students in the sample. Implications for the instruction and assessment of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability are discussed.

Exploring the Factor Structure of a K–12 English Language Proficiency Assessment

ABSTRACT In this study we investigated the internal factor structure of a large-scale K–12 assessment of English language proficiency (ELP) using samples of fourth- and eighth-grade English learners (ELs) in one state. While U.S. schools are mandated to measure students’ ELP in four language domains (listening, reading, speaking, and writing), some ELP standards released recently have defined ELP on the basis of integrated modalities, such as receptive language or collaborative communication. To explore whether current assessments can empirically support new conceptualizations such as these, we compared seven models based on different hypothesized structures for language proficiency. For the Grade 8 students, we find support for a hierarchical factor model, with general language underlying the four domains. A model with the four domains offered the best fit for the Grade 4 sample but fell just shy of criteria for acceptable fit. Models that incorporate more specific higher-order modalities, such as literacy or productive language, functioned less well for the given data of Grades 4 and 8 samples, suggesting the current shift in ELP definition may require shifts in how ELP assessments are built and scored.