A cultural perspective on writing evaluation of Korean, English-Language-Learning children.

摘要

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rubric, which is a standard rubric used by most of the states in the U.S., evaluates children's narrative writing based on grammar, organization, vocabulary, word choice, etc. However, the NAEP rubric and evaluation methods used by many states do not consider narrative traits when assessing writing. In order to ensure valid evaluation of children's narrative writing worldwide, it seems desirable to find a means to evaluate "narrative" qualities that arise from children's different cultural backgrounds.;The present study examined ratings of 90 written stories, with and without consideration of narrative traits, such as morals of stories and characters' emotions. Participants were 30 monolingual English-speaking (ME), 30 Korean English-Language-Learning (ELL), and 30 monolingual Korean-speaking (MK) children, who wrote one story each. The NAEP rubric was modified to include these narrative traits, and any changes in the scores were analyzed when both the NAEP and the modified rubrics were used to evaluate the children's narrative writing.;Primary results indicated that children in the three groups did not earn higher scores for their written stories when scored with the modified rubric. The lack of significant differences between ratings assigned with the two rubrics within each group suggests that the modified rubric does not favor a certain group nor result in better performance for participants as a whole, which shows that the addition of narrative components in the evaluation did not cause any "harm". When correlations were examined between frequency counts of narrative traits and writing performance with the two rubrics, it was found that MK children with limited English proficiency were still able to express morals of stories and characters' emotions.;In summary, the results of this study suggest that including narrative traits in writing evaluations still lead to valid assessment of children's narrative writing. Consequently, children may tend to develop writing skills at the expense of narrative ones. In order to promote development of narrative skills at an early age, inclusion of narrative measures, such as the ones in the present study, may be important to standardized assessment of children's narrative writing.