The Effects of Draft-Specific Scoring on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learner’s Writing

Abstract

Providing feedback is one of the crucial and significant aspects of writing and is considered as a complicated and time consuming task for teachers. However, due to instructional regulation and evaluation during a course, deviation from grading the learners’ writing sample is inevitable. Thus, for overcoming the restrict attention to writing scores, a new grading technique called Draft-specific Scoring (DSS) was introduced to motivate students rather than demotivate them in scoring system. However, only few studies in the EFL context have employed DSS. Therefore the presents study aims to investigate the effectiveness of applying DSS on learner’s writing samples. Fifty-five male and female learners were randomly assigned in two groups of experimental and control. While participants in the experimental group were required to write ten assignments using DSS and improve their grades, control group members did not receive any feedback and their scores were fixed. In order to analyze the data, pre-test, mid-test and post-test of the experimental and control groups were applied. The results indicated that there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test of the experimental group; however, there were not any meaningful differences between pre-test and post-test of control group. Draft-Specific Scoring has some implications for both teachers and students. Teachers spend less time for grading and students focus on teacher’s feedback in order to improve their scores.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s1p178