Young Adolescent EFL Students’ Writing Skill Development: Insights From Assessment Data

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental writing patterns of English as a foreign language (EFL) students across different score levels through a TOEFL Junior® writing task. The sample of this study comprised 2,016 young adolescent EFL students, ranging from 10 to 15 years old, who took the TOEFL Junior test. We performed a detailed analysis of student essays to identify possible patterns in the development of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability. Linguistic characteristics, such as lexical, syntactic, and discourse features, as well as organizational and content features specific to the argumentative writing genre, were examined by using automated writing evaluation tools and human ratings. The results of descriptive statistics, significance testing, and regression analyses yielded notable patterns for linguistic accuracy and complexity variables. Certain linguistic and content-related features also were found to be highly associated with the writing quality of the young EFL students in the sample. Implications for the instruction and assessment of young adolescent EFL students’ academic writing ability are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In this article we use the phrase “L2 learners” to refer to both English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners.

² A sample TOEFL Junior test Opinion writing task is available at https://toefljr.caltesting.org/sampleQuestions/TOEFLJr/w-cellphoneopinion.html.

³ In conducting the Kruskal–Wallis tests, the median ranks were used. However, we report the descriptive statistics, including mean and SD, instead of the median ranks to show the distribution of each variable scores/counts.