English as a second language writing revisited: Grading timed essay responses for overall quality and global assets

Recent research about second language acquisition, writing assessment, and second language writing offers much that teachers of college-bound English as a second language (ESL) learners can use. This study first presented selections of this research to illuminate current wisdom about one of the greatest challenges ahead for these learners. To enter a college-credit degree-seeking program, they will have to write well enough, under a time limit and test conditions, to convince non-ESL graders of their college readiness.; Next, this study investigated a two-pronged, seldom-studied phenomenon---overall quality and global strengths in college-ready ESL timed writings. To obtain results, an experienced chief scorer first trained six college English professors to score 60 ESL timed essays upon a holistic reading, ranking at the top all that resembled entry-level college freshman composition drafts. Holistic scores ended in 45 agreements and 15 disagreements, an acceptable .75 interrater reliability. After disagreements were resolved, the 60 essays were divided into four writing proficiency levels at these rank scores: 11 essays at the top score of 4---college-ready; and 49 essays at 3, 2, and 1---advanced, intermediate, and beginning ESL, respectively. Second, the chief trained the graders to rank score 4 global areas---focus, development, organization, and clarity. The graders read the 60 essays more deliberately, considered the 4 global areas in turn, and assigned each an analytic rank score. Discoveries about the global strengths of the 11 essays that these professors scored college-ready suggest that teachers can guide ESL learners to achievable goals. A subsequent post-scoring question-and-answer session enriched the scoring results by contributing these English teachers' reactions to ESL writing in general, and to some of these timed essays in particular.; Results suggest that if ESL teachers used holistic and analytic scoring methods, they could give their learners more frequent writing opportunities and more useful feedback about overall quality and global strengths and weaknesses. Findings also suggest that more studies obtaining college English teachers' reactions to ESL timed writings for college entry would help build and illustrate definitions of the top and lower proficiency levels of such writing, from a non-ESL perspective.