The Effects Of Rubric-referenced Self-assessment On The EFL Writing Of Chinese Non-English Majors

Though self-assessment has aroused an upsurge of interest in various educationalcontexts, surprisingly sparse longitudinal studies on rubric-referenced self-assessmenthave been undertaken of its effectiveness on EFL writing, especially for non-Englishmajors in Chinese context. This thesis thus aims to bridge the gap by exploringwhether a mode of rubric-referenced self-assessment improves Chinese non-Englishmajors’ EFL writing outputs and alters their conception of EFL writing.Six female freshmen as well as two English teachers participated in the presentstudy, which is an intervention experiment wherein a pre-test and a post-test areemployed. Firstly, a pilot study together with a training session was conducted. Thenstudents were involved in three rounds of self-assessment activities, which consist ofstudents’ composing compositions, reading model essays, doing self-assessment, andreflecting on teacher’s feedback. Finally, the data about six students’ writing scriptsand transcribed retrospective interviews in both the pre-test and post-test wascollected.As for the quantitative analysis about teachers’ scores on students’ compositions,the Wilcoxon signed rank test was conducted and it showed that students’ outputs inthe post-test were significantly better in terms of content, coherence, accuracy andsyntax except the lexical complexity. With respect to the detailed analysis aboutstudents’ interviews, the winMAX (1998) was employed and the evidence of astudent’s (Emily) utterances was provided. The conclusion was reached that studentparticipants maintained their conception about content and organization, took lessconsideration of audience (e.g. teacher-raters) and others (e.g. time), and graduallyshifted their focus from on the aspect of idea to coherence, language accuracy andcomplexity when they were composing in the post-test. In addition, studentparticipants generally attributed their own progress to either teacher’s feedback orself-assessment form, or both of them. Specifically, the self-assessment form mainly helped students realize the importance of language accuracy and complexity, teacher’sfeedback aided them to know more about coherence, organization as well as languagecomplexity, and the model essays together with students’ reflection sharpened theirunderstanding about writing rubrics.Rubric-referenced self-assessment, therefore, was proposed to be imbedded intoEFL writing courses, especially writing training courses within a small class. Besides,teachers had better give more targeted instruction based on the information aboutstudents’ understanding towards EFL writing, and take more consideration aboutstudents’ progress in the process of writing via this mode of self-assessment.