65th Article "Comparing writing performance in TOEFL-iBT and Academic assignments: An exploration of textual features"

Ayu Rini Tri Utari
16611046
Review of the 65th article


"Comparing writing performance in TOEFL-iBT and Academic assignments: An exploration of textual features"


This paper reports an exploratory study in which the written texts produced by postgraduate students in test and real-life academic situation are compared in terms of the linguistic and discoursal features. The test used the participants were studying in postgraduate programs in five universities in New South Wales, Australia. These participants completed two writing test tasks of the TOEFL-iBT (integrated and independent tasks). Textual features of the test and academic assignment texts were compared on 20 linguistic and discoursal features. Features are related to syntactic complexity (five variables), lexical sophistication (nine variables) and cohesion (six variables). Results of a series of repeated measures Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) indicated similarities and differences in the linguistic and discoursal features of the three writing task texts.