Using Coh-Metrix to Analyze Chinese ESL Learners’ Writing

Abstract

Scoring essays is a costly, laborious and time-consuming effort. Automated scoring of essays is a promising approach to face this challenge. Coh-Metrix is a computer tool which reports on a wide range of linguistic features and several dimensions of cohesions. It has been widely used to analyze essays written by native English speakers. However, few studies have been conducted to use Coh-Metrix for analyzing essays written by English as a Second Language (ESL) students. In this study, we analyzed the correlation between several Coh-Metrix features combined with a set of newly proposed features and the quality of essays, written by Chinese university students, both English and non-English majors. This study shows that each group of students tend to write essays that have their own signature features. The quality of essays written by English majors are highly correlated to importance of introduction, conclusion and cohesion at sentence level, while the quality of essays written by chemistry majors are highly related to mechanics errors, sentence complexity and cohesion at paragraph level.