Judgment accuracy in primary school EFL writing assessment: Do text characteristics matter?

Assessing the writing competence of pupils learning English as a foreign language (EFL) at primary school is challenging. This study aimed at examining a largely unexplored topic, namely the role of text characteristics in writing assessment, and analysed judgment accuracy differentiated by nine aspects of text quality (communicative effect, level of detail, coherence, cohesion, complexity of syntax and grammar, correctness of syntax and grammar, vocabulary, orthography and punctuation). Two hundred pre-service teachers assessed four randomly assigned texts from learners in grade six. Their assessment was compared to the existing ratings of two experts from a previous study. We found a relative judgment accuracy between r = .34 and .60 for the nine assessment criteria, with vocabulary being assessed significantly more accurately than almost all other criteria. Orthography, complexity and correctness of syntax and grammar and punctuation were rated with significantly more accuracy than cohesion, level of detail, communicative effect and coherence. The pre-service teachers assessed most criteria more strictly and with higher variability than the experts. The results suggest that teacher education should offer pre-service teachers concrete opportunities to practise writing assessment, implement activities to strengthen the assessment of content- and structure-related criteria, and help them adjust their assessment rigour.