Linguistic Features of Writing Quality

Autor/inn/en	McNamara, Danielle S.; Crossley, Scott A.; McCarthy, Philip M.
Titel	Linguistic Features of Writing Quality
Quelle	In: Written Communication, 27 (2010) 1, S.57-86 (30 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	Weitere Informationen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0741-0883
DOI	10.1177/0741088309351547
Schlagwörter	Essays; Undergraduate Students; Educational Quality; Computational Linguistics; Word Frequency; Connected Discourse; Computer Software; Difficulty Level; Sentence Structure; Verbs; Vocabulary; Scoring Rubrics; Reading Comprehension + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Essay; Aufsatzunterricht; Quality of education; Bildungsqualität; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Word analysis; Frequency; Wortanalyse; Häufigkeit; Schwierigkeitsgrad; Satzbau; Satzstruktur; Wortschatz; Scoring formulas; Auswertungsbogen; Leseverstehen
Abstract	In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by linguistic indices of "cohesion" (i.e., coreference and connectives), "syntactic complexity" (e.g., number of words before the main verb, sentence structure overlap), the "diversity of words" used by the writer, and "characteristics of words" (e.g., frequency, concreteness, imagability). The three most predictive indices of essay quality in this study were syntactic complexity (as measured by number of words before the main verb), lexical diversity (as measured by the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity), and word frequency (as measured by Celex, logarithm for all words). Using 26 validated indices of cohesion from Coh-Metrix, none showed differences between high- and low-proficiency essays and no indices of cohesion correlated with essay ratings. These results indicate that the textual features that characterize good student writing are not aligned with those features that facilitate reading comprehension. Rather, essays judged to be of higher quality were more likely to contain linguistic features associated with text difficulty and sophisticated language. (Contains 7 tables, 1 figure, and 4 notes.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10