Although many studies have been done based on the Toulmin model, only a few involve EFL students at different proficiency levels. The present study compares the English argumentative essays of first-year students with those of the fourth-year students in terms of the use of Toulmin elements and argument complexity. Altogether 62 timed argumentative writings were selected from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners. Toulmin elements， namely Claim, Subclaim, Data, Warrant-Backing, Counterargument-claim, Counterargument-data, and Rebuttal were investigated, as well as Data length, Warrant-Backing length, argument depth and width. The results show that the two groups of essays have almost no difference in the use of Toulmin elements except Warrant-Backing, and that the fourth-year students perform better in argument complexity. It is concluded that the use of the Toulmin elements cannot clearly differentiate proficient writers; however, argument complexity showed improvement.
2025-10-10
This paper presents a personal picture of my long-standing association with the English language teaching and assessment situation in Hong Kong. The paper presents a 50-year retrospective of assessment in Hong Kong, through the lens of my 40 years in the territory and my personal experience of English language teaching, teacher education, and assessment. I present a historical and theoretical picture of how English language examinations have moved forward in Hong Kong, and how I was fortunate enough to be involved in the big changes which were taking place in assessment and English language assessment in particular. While the picture I portray through this paper is a somewhat personal one, it contributes to an understanding of how assessment reform has been forward-looking, and largely successful, in Hong Kong, painting a picture of how assessment development has complemented curriculum development. I suggest that it may be instructive for educators in other jurisdictions to consider the long-term picture of development in English language assessment reform in their own country with a view to analyzing their own perspectives of the relative success of policy changes and large-scale reforms.
In conversational interaction for language learning, dynamic assessment involves an expert’s strategic use of feedback and assessment with the goal of mediating a learner’s autonomous development. Traditionally a trained teacher's tool, dynamic assessment was taught to Japanese university students for use in learner-learner group conversational interaction in pursuit of two main goals: to describe the occurrence rate of learner implemented dynamic assessment and to describe usage in relation to mediation and scaffolding. Quantitative results show that, following instruction, learners did not often use dynamic assessment for the purpose of mediation. Analysis of transcripts suggests that learners used dynamic assessment to scaffold task resolution rather than mediating development. Together these results shed light on the extent to which dynamic assessment can be effectively taught to and appropriated by learners for the purposes of scaffolding and mediation.
The belief that genre specific reading provides numerous benefits for apprenticing writers is something we in the field of writing education value as an underlying constant. Accepting this, writing center directors stock their self-access library shelves with a variety of composition texts, to include rhetorics (and the essays therein). To select these materials, readability formulae (e.g., the Lexile Readability Formula) are often employed. However, such formulae only measure two of the many features that make up the readability of an essay (i.e., semantic, syntactic). Other important features such as the title are not considered. To address this, this article reports the results of a sequential, mixed-methods study conducted in an Asian postsecondary setting. The study found that titles influence readability both as (a) a primary (i.e., an isolated feature) and (b) a conjoined feature (i.e., consisting of two or more associated entities where the second impacts the first). The article also makes a recommendation for teachers, writing center staff, and the publishing industry that readability formulae be administered in a hybrid fashion to explore additional features such as the title when considering the difficulty of exemplars.
The current study employed The KEYHOLE Model (Baker, 1984) to analyze features of rhetorical organizations of 88 English argumentative essays written by Chinese university EFL students. The results indicated that 92% of sampled students employed deductive rhetorical organizations to compose their arguments, over 50% essays did not exhibit rhetorical coherence between supporting details and the thesis statement, and 34.1% sampled essays showed a discursive relationship between claims in the thesis statement and supporting details in body paragraphs. The 30 essays which did present supporting details to respond to the claim in the thesis statement, but only 10 essays indicated a high degree of rhetorical coherence between the thesis statement and its body paragraphs. The remaining 20 essays displayed a low degree of rhetorical coherence between the thesis statement and its body paragraphs. The majority of sample essays tended to use deductive rhetorical organizations but failed to achieve effectiveness in arguments. The instruction should be further focused on writing the thesis statement in the aspect of well-written rhetorical coherence. The findings suggest that L2 writing syllabi should design graded tasks on raising the Chinese students’ rhetorical awareness and skills for better intercultural communication.
Adolescent newcomer programs respond to superdiverse demographic shifts and, in the United States, are designed to support students with English language acquisition and preparation for mainstream or bilingual education. This eight-month ethnographic study examines a specific multilingual, multicultural group in an ESL biology classroom at a Central Ohio adolescent newcomer program and explores the stances group members take toward a Somali female student, Farin. Employing evaluating and positioning as stance-taking (Du Bois, 2007), we investigate how Farin's participation is evaluated and how her social identities are constructed in her group interaction. Over a series of classroom events, the group members take up regressive stances based on local ideologies about silence and appropriate group participation. These thicken over time despite various moves Farin makes to assert a positive group identity. This study underscores the potential consequences of teacher's evaluation of students’language in that students often employ the stance in constructing their relationships and identities, thus reinforcing particular ideologies associated with teacher's epistemic stance.
Since the inception of Kachru’s (1976) “three circles” model of World Englishes, the field has struggled with the relation between British and American Englishes and second and third circle innovations such as Hinglish, Singlish, Japlish, etc . Despite efforts from many scholars to approach all Englishes as relatively equal, “native speaker/standard” forms of British and American English continue to be the benchmarks of proficiency, and standard English competency an avenue to economic and political advantage, a situation Phillipson labels “linguistic imperialism.” Challenging this imperialistic dichotomy is necessary if we are to find ways to “decolonize” (Bhatt, 2001, p. 544) the study, teaching, and perception of World Englishes. This article uniquely applies Conceptual Metaphorical Analysis of the native speaker/owner metaphor that sustains this situation, interpreting it through what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) refer to as metaphorical “entailments” ( Metaphors we live by , p. 9), associations that enable the dominant metaphor. This article illustrates how we can break this chain of entailments by displacing the fictional standard of the native speaker, deconstructing the notion that English as an object one can own, and exposing the mistaken belief that there is or ever has been such a thing as “standard English.” The final section offers some alternatives to the native speaker/owner metaphor that open the possibility that English belongs to both no one and everyone.
This is an interview with Dr. Yan Jin, professor of linguistics and applied linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Chair of the National College English Testing Committee in China. In this interview, Dr. Yan Jin discusses how she started her career as a language tester and why she has dedicated herself to the language testing profession. She looks back on her 30 or so years of experience working with the large-scale, high-stakes College English Test (CET) developed by language testers in China, and introduces the important measures that have been taken to maintain the high quality of the CET and to adapt the test to meet changing social needs. She stresses the need for language testing professionals to consider their social responsibilities and take care of the social dimension of language testing. She also comments on the recent development of the national standards of English proficiency in China and the relationship between the language standards and English curricula and assessments. She further describes her active involvement in community services in the field of language testing and assessment which she believes has contributed to her professional career as a language tester. At the end of the interview, she provides valuable advice, based on her testing research experience, to young testing researchers and prospective researchers in the field, which can be very helpful on their path to pursuing language testing as a profession.
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