Comparison of Three Kinds of Alternative Essay-Rating Methods to the ESL Composition Profile

Abstract

Although the ESL Composition Profile (CP) has been widely used by scholars as a well-balanced rubric for learner essay evaluation, it is not necessarily easy for L2 teachers to rate students' essays based on the five criteria of the CP. This indicates the necessity to explore reliable alternatives to the CP. This article, therefore, compares three kinds of alternative approaches: (1) using the simplified version of the CP, (2) using edited essays, and (3) using model essays, paying attention to the correlation between each of the possible alternatives and the original CP. Our learner-corpus-based analysis has shown that simplifying the CP and paying attention to the organization of learner essays appears to be the most effective method.