影响英语写作评分的因素研究——以“外研社杯”全国英语写作大赛评分为例.pdf

Abstract In a rating approach there are four major facets to consider, including the writing tasks, the rating scale, characteristics of the raters and characteristics of the writers. Different from the previous studies on large-scale standardized tests, the present study aims to setting up an satisfactory rating approach for the high-level writing contest by investigating how the facets in the approach will interact with each other and how the interaction will affect the rating outcome. The context of the current study is the “FLTRP Cup” English Writing Contest which, compared with other common large-scale tests, is far more competitive and challenging for the contestants who have to stand out in the previous rounds if they want to proceed to gain the awards in the final. The data for the present study is based on the Final round in 2013 when raters of different background rated different tasks in different rating scales. The data analysis was then performed in three stages to answer the three research questions concerning the effects of the rating approach on the rating outcomes. The first step was to exam the rating quality of the analytic and the holistic scale in the perspectives of contestant ability estimates, rater severity, scale functioning and bias interaction. After the general results were gained, the above analysis was repeated for the second task to see if there was any genre effect. The next step was to check the role of each rating criterion in terms of the criterion difficulty. Finally, an integrate