RELATIONSHIP OF ADMISSION TEST SCORES TO WRITING PERFORMANCE OF NATIVE AND NONNATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

ABSTRACT Four writing samples were obtained from 638 applicants for admission to U.S. institutions as undergraduates or as graduate students in business, engineering, or social science. The applicants represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), plus a small sample of native English speakers. Two of the writing topics were of the compare and contrast type and the other two involved chart and graph interpretation. The writing samples were scored by 23 readers who are English as a second language specialists and 23 readers who are English writing experts. Each of the four writing samples was scored holistically, and during a separate rating session two of the samples from each student were assigned separate scores for sentence‐level and discourse‐level skills. Representative subsamples of the papers also were scored descriptively with the Writer's Workbench computer program and by graduate‐level subject matter professors in engineering and the social sciences. In addition to the writing sample scores, TOEFL scores were obtained for all students in the foreign sample. GRE General Test scores were obtained for students in the U.S. sample and for a subsample of students in the foreign sample. Students in the U.S. sample also took a multiple‐choice measure of writing ability. Among the key findings were the following: 1) holistic scores, discourse‐level scores, and sentence‐level scores were so closely related that the holistic score alone should be sufficient; 2) correlations among topics were as high across topic types as within topic types; 3) scores of ESL raters, English raters, and subject matter raters were all highly correlated, suggesting substantial agreement in the standards used; correlations and factor analyses indicated that scores on the writing samples and TOEFL were highly related, but that each also was reliably measuring some aspect of English language proficiency that was not assessed by the other; and (5) correlations of holistic writing sample scores with scores on item types within the sections of the GRE General Test yielded a pattern of relationships that was consistent with the relationships reported in other GRE studies.