The Influence of Spelling and Prompting on Teacher Judgments of English Essays

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Effective Literacy Instruction and Assessment in Preservice Teachers

Abstract

The research of teachers’ diagnostic competence rarely considers factors influencing teacher judgments (TJ). This experimental study investigates the influence of text quality and spelling on TJ of English as a second language argumentative essays. Using two rating scales, teachers (N = 77) assessed four essays of different proficiency levels in which quality of spelling had been experimentally varied. One-half of the participants received a prompt instructing them to be aware of possible distortion effects due to spelling. Results showed that teachers were able to distinguish between texts of different proficiency levels. Texts with many spelling mistakes were assessed more negatively with regard to spelling and all other judgment criteria. Furthermore, the prompt reduced the distortion effect of spelling.

Authors

• Thorben Jansen, University of Kiel

• Cristina Voegelin, University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland

• Nils Machts, University of Kiel

• Stefan Daniel Keller, University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland

• Jens Moeller, University of Kiel