The Analysis On Objective Factors Of The Chinese Essays Written By Foreign Students And Their Effects On The Scoring

As the essential component in the language teaching, writing is an integrative ability to use language and involves many language factors. Recently, as the development of the linguistic theories and the teaching theories, more and more importance is attached to the communicative competence. Accordingly, the writing is more and more important in the language test. However, there arises a problem, that is scoring subjectivity which does deserve our attention. At present, holistic (or Impression) method of marking and analytic method of marking are mostly used in the large-scale language test, but they don't overcome the subjectivity of the scoring. On the other hand, as the developing of the computer technology, it is the trend to use the computer to score the language test, including the grading of writing. And it must be based on the objective scoring of writing.There are many reasons for the subjectivity of writing scoring, including the writing itself and the examiner's. The writing involves many factors: language, content, structure, design etc. The examiners maybe attach importance to the different factor. All these can result in the scoring subjectivity. Because of this, based on the previous researching results of ESL and the key points in second-language writing teaching, the thesis concentrates on the study of the language component in the writing. We extract 46 factors that can be objectively measured and call them objective-factors. The thesis studies the relations among the factors and their effects on the examiners' scoring. On the experiential and empirical basis, we analyze the objective-factors characteristics of the students' essays and discuss the reasons. Then the factors are reduced into five kinds: fluency, grammatical difficulty, vocabulary difficulty, vocabulary abundance, and mechanics. We think that the primary factors affected the scoring are the fluency and vocabulary difficulty. In the end, we suggest some ways to improve the writing teaching.Owing to the limitation of the experiment condition, the subjects are restricted to the middle-lower level foreign students and the type of essay is narrative. The other types of essays and other levels students will worth further studying.