Responding to non-native and native writers of English: A history professor's indigenous criteria for grading and feedback in an undergraduate sinology course

I conducted a case study of how a senior university professor presented course content and assessed 2 sets of essays and 2 sets of in-class tests in an undergraduate Sinology course. The study involved the participating professor and 12 students who allowed me to photocopy their written work for analysis. Besides collecting documentary evidence, I attended all class meetings, interviewed the professor after he had graded assignments, and asked him for retrospective verbal protocols concerning 8 essays and 8 test answers. After the course had concluded I interviewed the professor and participating students concerning their overall impressions.; I then analyzed my notes of class meetings to specify the presentation and negotiation of course content and assignment requirements. Next, I employed propositional analyses (of students' writing, interviews, and protocol data) to reconstruct the processes the professor employed in reading and assessing students' work, and the indigenous assessment criteria (those generalizable only to specific communities of practice) he relied on. I followed this with a quantitative analysis, applying objective measures of both language and content to students' writings and correlating these with the grades assigned.; I concluded from these analyses that (i) the professor's assessment procedures conformed to a Construction-Integration model of reading, but with evaluative operations supplementing the integration of meaning from the texts; (ii) the indigenous assessment criteria applied to students' work were embedded in substantive class discussions; (iii) key determinants of success in writing included choice of arguments and argument sequences in test answers, and choice of issues and source materials, and command of language in essays; (iv) the professor imposed his agenda for course content and performance standards by bringing his 'academic capital' to the class in a non-threatening manner, thus creating a formative experience for students who may consider joining the community of practice of historians.; This study highlights the importance of contextualized case studies of assessment. It also cautions against transferring analytical tools from second-language writing and assessment research to studying writing assessment in academic contexts, because abstract notions of critical thinking and writing are largely embedded in discussions of substantive content in 'content-based' university courses.