Native and Nonnative Reactions to ESL Compositions
Toshihiko Kobayashi · TESOL Quarterly · 1992
This study investigated how English native speakers (ENSs) and Japanese native speakers (JNSs) of professorial, graduate, and undergraduate levels evaluate and edit ESL compositions written by Japanese college students. A total of 274 subjects first evaluated each of two compositions in terms of grammaticality, clarity of meaning, naturalness, and organization, using 10- point scales. ENSs were more strict about grammaticality and naturalness than were JNSs. Among the ENSs, the higher the academic status of the group, the more positive evaluation they made. The subjects then edited the composition, correcting everything that seemed ungrammatical, unacceptable or unnatural. ENSs provided far more corrections and corrected errors more accurately than did the JNSs. In both L1 groups, the higher the academic status, the more accurately the group corrected errors. JNSs left many errors uncorrected, especially errors involving articles, number, prepositions, and lexical items which occur in Japanese as loan words from English.