Today I'm printing a pilot study I wrote as a seminar paper for one of my PhD classes, a course in researching second language learning. It was one of the first times I did what I think of as real empirical research, using an actual data set. That data set came from a professor friend of mine. It was a corpus of essays written for a major test of writing in English, often used for entrance into English-language colleges and universities, and developed by a major testing company. The essays came packaged with metadata include the score they received, making them ideal for investigating the relationship between textual features and perceived quality, then as now a key interest of mine. And since the data had been used in real-world testing with high stakes for test takers, it added obvious exigence to the project. The data set was perfect - except for the very fact that it was from Big Testing Company, and thus proprietary and subject to their rules about using their data.
I read this fairly carefully and did not see any suggestion that D could correlate with grammar. It may be that the rating of the essay resulted more from grammar and spelling and that D is correlated to that.
I read this fairly carefully and did not see any suggestion that D could correlate with grammar. It may be that the rating of the essay resulted more from grammar and spelling and that D is correlated to that.