Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\nWith the accelerated move to online learning, writing skills have become increasingly important for managing digital genres, such as educational blogs and discussion forums. Although effective written communication via such media is important for student success, many university-level second language learners navigate these unfamiliar tasks without access to guidelines concerning content, structure, and language use. Researchers in Applied Linguistics have suggested communicating teacher expectations through descriptive rubrics (Crusan, 2010; Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014; Weigle, 2002), and this dissertation investigates the effects of sharing an analytic rubric on learners\u2019 written development.<\/p>\n
The first phase of this sequential mixed-methods research involved the expert review of academic blog posts written by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Quantitative and qualitative data gathered during the review led to the identification of five categories around which learners\u2019 written performance was assessed, including (a) genre-specific features (i.e., use of hyperlinks), (b) task fulfillment and relevancy, (c) content, (d) organization and balance, and (e) language use. On the resulting analytic rubric, each category was assessed on a 1- to 6-point scale. In Phase II, six raters used the rubric to score the posts written by 163 EFL learners. A many-facets Rasch analysis revealed that the rubric categories were functioning appropriately; however, the raters were not using the full 6-point scale.<\/p>\n
In the final phase, written data from the blog entries of 31 learners were collected over two years, with 15 participants having access to the revised (4-point) rubric. After data collection, raters who were unaware of the order of composition scored three posts per participant according to the revised scale. A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the presence of the rubric, time, and the interaction of the rubric and time had a significant positive impact on average scores (p < 0.001). Participants\u2019 longitudinal written development was also analyzed via nine linguistic indices covering lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and syntactic complexity. The mean values for two variables, noun-adjective and verb-direct object dependency bigrams, demonstrated a significant change over time, while the moving-average type-token ratio (MATTR) and lexical decision time contributed to a regression model predicting 16% of variance in language use scores. A subsequent rhetorical moves analysis revealed a sequence of optimal steps for constructing an academic blog post. The results of this study are of use to pedagogues and researchers interested in digital genres, technology-mediated tasks, and second language writing assessment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"