Evaluating ESL: Making sense of university professors’ responses to second language writing

This study addresses the response of social science and engineering science faculty to a naturally occurring sample of second language writing. Using a matched-guise protocol, faculty participants were led to believe that the one-page essay was produced by an international student whose first language was either Chinese or Spanish. The faculty evaluated the writing holistically (on a scale from 1 to 10) and were invited to “correct the five most troublesome errors.” Results indicate that the ethnic guise did not affect holistic scores; however, the social science and engineering science faculty did rate the composition differently. While qualitative analysis demonstrates that, not surprisingly, individual editing styles among faculty are quite variable, there was a tendency across faculty to edit semantic gaps as opposed to grammatical items. This indicates a preference by the faculty to clarify content, a finding that supports prior research.