Abstract
This paper investigates the writing ability of Japanese high school students. The study was designed to analyze English compositions written by 43 students in Japanese high school EFL courses. The participants were given two different topics and asked to compose a short essay in response to each assigned topic. The writing quality of the compositions was evaluated by a trained native-speaking rater of English according to 3-point rating scales on 5 measures: quality of content, rhetorical organization, logical connection of ideas, sentence-level acceptability (syntax and cohesion) and diversity of vocabulary, in addition to a 5-point holistic judgment of overall quality and written comments on good points and weak points on the compositions. The analysis revealed that (a) there was a significant correlation between the two topics in the overall assessment of the compositions, (b) there were good writers and weak writers among the participants and the former wrote significantly better in quality of content and diversity of vocabulary than the latter, and (c) the rater's comments exhibited that discourse and rhetorical features and lexical and syntactic variations affected the writing quality of the compositions.
