Linguistic Features of Secondary School Writing: Can Natural Language Processing Shine a Light on Differences by Sex, English Language Status, or Higher Scoring Essays?

Written Communication Jul 2024 Open Access

Linguistic Features of Secondary School Writing: Can Natural Language Processing Shine a Light on Differences by Sex, English Language Status, or Higher Scoring Essays?

Tamara P. Tate ; Young-Suk Grace Kim ; Penelope Collins University of California, Irvine ; Mark Warschauer University of California, Irvine ; Carol Booth Olson University of California, Irvine

Abstract

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

Journal: Written Communication
Published: 2024-07-01
DOI: 10.1177/07410883241242093
Open Access: OA PDF Hybrid
Topics: multimodality gender and writing affect and writing

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

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U.S. Secondary Students’ Source-Based Argument Writing in History

Written Communication

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