1.5 Organization of the book
The book falls into six chapters.Chapter 1 outlines the context,motivations,and research questions guiding the overall research design as well as the potential contributions of the study.
Chapter 2 is devoted to a comprehensive literature review related to Research Question 1.It aims to describe construct of writing proficiency of pre-service EFL teachers in the context of professional preparation of English teachers and current standards/requirements on writing proficiency in both native and nonnative-speaking settings.It also arrives at a list of discourse analytic measures,which are used as a basis for the empirical investigation of writing performances of pre-service EFL teachers in Study One.Chapter 3 reviews studies in the field of writing assessment on rater judgment and interpretation for their scoring decisions and thought processes.In addition,the research methods employed in Study Two:the Many-Facet Rasch Model(MFRM)and the concurrent introspective technique in the form of think-aloud protocols in examining rater judgments in writing assessment are also discussed for guiding the research design in Study Two.
Chapter 4 provides an overview of the research design and methodology of Study One.The data collection procedures including the writing test,selection of discourse analysis of features are also described.Results are also reported and discussed in this chapter.Chapter 5 focuses on Study Two,which explored the scoring judgments of pre-service EFL teachers at different levels of writing proficiency.Apart from the explanations and justifications on the data collection and data analysis methods,this chapter reports the major findings in relation to the research question explored.Chapter 6 summarizes the major findings of Study One and Study Two.The implications for L2 writing performance assessment research and practices as well as language teacher professional development are discussed.Future agenda is proposed in terms of both research focus and research methodology.