Towards an error taxonomy for student writing
Nikola Dobrić, Guenther Sigott · TUbilio (Technical University of Darmstadt) · 2023
Current practice in writing assessment has tended to divert attention from the notion of error in favour of more global and intuitive descriptions of learner performance. As a result, experts tend to disagree in the way errors in student writing are described. This brings about complications for student feedback as well as for studying the construct validity (cf. Messick 1989) of rater-mediated assessments of student writing by means of computer-corpus-based methodology, which requires reliable annotation. In order to alleviate these complications, an error taxonomy is proposed which could serve as a basis for student feedback on the one hand, and as a basis for corpus-based studies into the construct validity of large-scale assessments of writing, on the other.