Evaluating Japanese Senior High School Students’ Writing Development with Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency

抄録

When high school students write a long paragraph in English, teachers, who are often pressed for time, tend to provide a holistic evaluation as a whole or count on an analytic assessment based on specific components such as grammar and vocabulary offered by commercial standardized testing companies. This was the firsthand observation of the author as a high school teacher. To address such a situation, the author attempts to identify indicators that have a strong relationship with analytic scores and are quick for teachers to implement. This study re-evaluates Japanese senior high school students’ writing development suggested by analytic scoring using primary trait scoring. The two essays, written by 78 students on two separate occasions one year apart, were assessed in complexity, accuracy, and fluency. A significant increase was found between the first-and second-year writing in three fluency and two accuracy measures. Moreover, three fluency and one accuracy indices had a moderate to a strong correlation with the Global Test of English Communication (GTEC) writing scores. These results suggest that some fluency and accuracy measures can be used in place of analytic scoring to measure writing development.