Teenage vocabulary and its assessment in creative writing

Within a study designed to find parameters of educated adult non-philologist L1-writings which give 'ideal' benchmarks for assessing high-stakes L1 and L2 writing tests, students' written vocabulary was targeted in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11 (age 12 to 18) to describe development towards those benchmarks (i.e., higher language cognition; see Hulstijn 2011). 159 students (90% of them native Estonians) were tasked to write an age-appropriate argumentative text on individual and social values. As supposed, teachers assessing writing holistically were not able to take into account vocabulary parameters. In grade 5, ratings correlated significantly with Guiraud; in grade II, there was a weak significant correlation between ratings and advanced vocabulary measures. Despite having better late vocabulary, boys' ratings were significantly lower. This seems to argue in favour of partial computer-scoring. Adapted from the source document