The study's purpose was to assess, through mixed methods, written linguistic features of 20 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in middle school. Students came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Participants wrote two expository and two narrative formal texts, each in Spanish and English, for a total of eight writing samples each. Additionally, students developed 10 journal entries in their language of choice, and 6 randomly selected, focal participants were interviewed for the qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis involved scoring formal texts at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Scores were analyzed using Friedman's 2-way ANOVA by ranks, and resulting ranks were compared across genre-topic and language. A key outcome was that the text topic, rather than genre or language, impacted on rank differences at all levels, possibly due to student engagement or influence of the prompt structure. Performance at the three levels was essentially similar across both languages, revealing that participants were emerging writers in Spanish and English. Similar outcomes in Spanish and English also implied potential cross-language transfer of academic language proficiency. Results further highlighted the interaction of multiple linguistic levels in text composition. Finally, students appeared to apply a knowledge telling strategy to writing, resulting in unsophisticated vocabulary and structures. For the qualitative analysis, focal participants' journals and interview transcripts were analyzed with domain and taxonomic analyses to discern how their language learning experiences shaped their identities as bilinguals. Results showed that 1) Spanish was preferred for all focal participants; 2) students shared the experience of language discrimination; 3) bilingual and monolingual identities resulted in different attitudes toward language learning and varied writing performance; and 4) Mexican and Puerto Rican students had diverse language learning experiences, leading to differences in identities and writing outcomes. Overall, the quantitative and qualitative findings raise two questions: 1) which aspects of academic language proficiency are shared across both languages, and how might these be assessed with bilingual, integrated language measures? 2) How might integrated assessment in L1 and L2 aid in identifying adolescent ELLs with language impairment?

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This thesis presents an investigation into secondary school English teachers’ and students’ conceptualisations of good writing, and how they might use their understandings of quality in writing for the purpose of improving writing. By focusing on the views and classroom practices of twelve-year-old students and their teachers, the research aims to advance understanding of teachers’ and students’ conceptual thinking about writing quality, and the underlying constructs. The research utilises data from an ESRC-funded project titled Grammar for Writing?: The Impact of Contextualised Grammar Teaching on Pupils’ Writing and Pupils’ Metalinguistic Understanding (grant number RES-062-23-0775). This data was gathered from thirty-one teachers and their Year 8 students over three terms. Lesson observations took place once each term, and were followed by interviews with each project teacher and one teacher-chosen student from each class. Interview questions relating to beliefs about good writing were included in the project schedules and were inductively analysed to discern themes in participants’ responses. Interviews with students took the form of ‘writing conversations’ during which students commented on samples of their own and their peers’ writing. A small-scale follow-up study with three Year 8 classes in one secondary school was used to confirm initial findings and to provide additional data on students’ beliefs about good writing. The research found that teachers’ conceptualisations of writing quality were internally consistent but that variation between teachers was marked. Teachers not only valued different qualities in writing but experienced different degrees of conflict and ambiguity when relating their personal construct of quality to the official, public construct, as embodied in national assessment criteria. The findings support earlier views of teacher judgement as richly textured and complex, drawing on different available indexes, including idiosyncratic conceptualisations of writing quality. Whilst students’ criteria for good writing echoed their teachers’ criteria to some extent, there was also evidence of students drawing on their own conceptualisations of quality, especially in relation to the intended impact of writing on the reader. Many students expressed a strong awareness of writing for an audience and clearly valued writing as a social practice. They especially valued peer judgement of their writing. However, students’ strategies for improving writing were often difficult to articulate, formulaic and generalised, or circumscribed by limited linguistic subject knowledge. The study is significant in offering an insight into teachers’ and students’ conceptualisations of writing quality and how these might be brought into play in the writing classroom. The findings may have particular resonance since they are reported at a time of radical change to assessment policy and practice in secondary schools in England.

In measuring second language learners’ writing proficiency, test takers’ performance on a particular assessment task is evaluated by raters using a set of criteria to generate writing scores. The scores are used by teachers, students, and parents to make inferences about their performance levels in real-life writing situations. To examine the accuracy of this inference, it is imperative that we investigate the sources of measurement error involved in the writing score. It is also important to ensure rater consistency, both within a single rater and between raters, to provide evidence that the scores are valid indicators of tested constructs. This mixed methods research addressed the validity of integrated listening-to-write (L-W) scores. More specifically, it examined the generalizability of L-W scores and raters’ decision-making processes and scoring challenges. A total of 198 high school English learners in Taiwan completed up to two L-W tasks, each of which required them to listen to an academic lecture and respond to a related writing prompt in English. Nine raters who had experience teaching English evaluated each student’s written materials using a holistic scale. This study employed a univariate two-facet random effects generalizability study (p × t × r) to investigate the effects of tasks and raters on the score variance. Subsequent decision studies (p × T × R) estimated standard error of measurement and generalizability coefficients. Post-rating stimulated recall interview data were analyzed qualitatively to explore raters’ alignment of rating scale descriptors, decision-making behaviors, and scoring challenges. The results indicated that the majority of score variance was explained by test takers’ ability difference in academic writing proficiency. The raters were similar in their stringency and did not contribute much to score variance. Due to a relatively large magnitude of person-by-task interaction effect, increasing the number of tasks, rather than raters, resulted in a much lower degree of error and higher degree of score generalizability. The ideal assessment procedure to achieve an acceptable level of score generalizability would be to administer two L-W tasks scored by two raters. When evaluating written materials for L-W tasks, nine raters primarily focused on the content of the essays and paid less attention to language-related features. The raters did not equally consider all aspects of essay features described in the holistic rubric. The most prominent scoring challenges included 1) assigning a holistic score while balancing students’ listening comprehension skills and writing proficiency and 2) assessing the degree of students’ successful reproduction of lecture content. The findings of this study have practical and theoretical implications for integrated writing assessments for high school EFL learners.

This study was aimed at addressing the adolescent learners’ writing needs by assessing teachers’ needs on writing instruction across the disciplines in Grades 9 and 10 in one school in Southwestern Ontario. The research employed a mixed-methods approach using qualitative data from focus group and one-on-one interviews, and quantitative data collected through document analysis. The data revealed that there is a range of beliefs about writing instruction and that participating teachers offer many valuable writing opportunities to their students; however, there is a reluctance to provide more instructional time on writing according to the content area. The findings also pointed to the influence school administrators have in leading the instructional program. These findings concur with existing literature on writing instruction and the role principals play in literacy instruction.

This study was aimed at addressing the adolescent learners’ writing needs by assessing teachers’ needs on writing instruction across the disciplines in Grades 9 and 10 in one school in Southwestern Ontario. The research employed a mixed-methods approach using qualitative data from focus group and one-on-one interviews, and quantitative data collected through document analysis. The data revealed that there is a range of beliefs about writing instruction and that participating teachers offer many valuable writing opportunities to their students; however, there is a reluctance to provide more instructional time on writing according to the content area. The findings also pointed to the influence school administrators have in leading the instructional program. These findings concur with existing literature on writing instruction and the role principals play in literacy instruction.