A Study Of Spelling Rating In NMET Writing Assessment

In the scoring rubric of NMET(National Matriculation English Test)writing,it is stated that "Spelling and punctuation are one aspect of linguistic accuracy and should be considered in terms of the extent to which they influence the communication." This is the only rule that include spelling.In this case,"the degree of influence on communication" is determined by the raters,who may have some subjectivity in rating.Then the reliability of the rating process is reduced.In addition,the spelling score of the students’ composition does not show in their final score,and the raters do not have a unified standard to rate spelling.Therefore,we need a reasonable explanation of spelling rating and specific data for the spelling score in the composition.In this paper,we firstly reviewed some studies about the spelling mistakes,the rating of English composition and spelling rating.Secondly,eight teachers were randomly selected to be our interviewees from hundreds of teachers who participated in 2017 NMET rating work,and the whole interview process was recorded by mobile phone.After the interview,the recording was transcribed,data in it was collected,classified and finally analyzed.To acquire more relevant data,after the interview,we distributed questionnaires to over 150 teacher-raters and 107 of them were collected.Then the data was classified,and analyzed.This paper,based on the 2017 NMET written expression,focusing on the rating process of the spelling,through a descriptive and quantitative research,and with the methodology of interview and questionnaire to the teacher-raters,tries to reveal the status of spelling in the NMET written expression rating and the raters’ view of all kinds of spelling mistakes and way of scoring them.It is hoped that this research will improve people’s understanding of spelling,raise their awareness of spelling and spelling rating,as well as increasing the consideration of different kinds of spelling errors in the rating scale.In classroom teaching,we hope that teachers can properly add some related knowledge of spelling when they teach grammar and vocabulary,so as to cultivate the basic and one of the most important abilities of the students in learning English,namely,the ability of spelling.The results of the study showed that,in the course of scoring the English composition of the NMET,the spelling was a weakened factor for most of the raters,and they did not score the spelling separately.For different types of spelling mistakes,the teacher-raters pointed out some spelling mistakes that students often make in high school,such as the misuse of spelling rules;the confusing words error and the lost or addition of the silent letter.After that,they promoted their degree of tolerance of different types of spelling errors.When it comes to the relationship between different types of spelling mistakes and students’ English proficiency,the raters all agreed that there is a certain relationship between the two.When rating spelling,however,the teachers usually did not analyze which type of spelling errors that the students committed and its relation with the students’ English proficiency.Their only criteria to rate spelling is the length and the number of the misspelled words,which is also the way they use to determine the English proficiency of students.Finally,based on the findings,implications and limitations of the present study are discussed and future research is suggested.