Raters' background reflected in EFL writing evaluation

Abstract

Who are ideal teachers in teaching EFL writing? It is arguable to decide who can be more qualified to teach writing; native speakers of English who have intuitive judgment in writing or Japanese teachers of English who have new-native speaker proficiency in English and have the experience of going through the complex process of acquiring English as a foreign language. The purpose of this study is investigate the differences in the criteria of writing assessment among the raters who have different backgrounds. Three native speaking raters and three Japanese raters participated in this study and their assessment criteria and types of feedback were compared to see what assumptions and expectations each group have toward students' writings. The native group relied on their intuitive judgment to measure the degree of naturalness and looked at writing tasks as a means of communication while the Japanese group was more concerned with sentence-level linguistic sophistication and used accuracy as the base line of their assessment. This study implies that the philosophies each rater has in terms of writing tasks reflect different expectation and assumptions.