Charting the Linguistic Landscape of Developing Writers: An Annotation Scheme for Enhancing Native Language Proficiency

Abstract

This study describes a pilot annotation task designed to capture orthographic, grammatical, lexical, semantic, and discursive patterns exhibited by college native English speakers participating in developmental education (DevEd) courses. The paper introduces an annotation scheme developed by two linguists aiming at pinpointing linguistic challenges that hinder effective written communication. The scheme builds upon patterns supported by the literature, which are known as predictors of student placement in DevEd courses and English proficiency levels. Other novel, multilayered, linguistic aspects that the literature has not yet explored are also presented. The scheme and its primary categories are succinctly presented and justified. Two trained annotators used this scheme to annotate a sample of 103 text units (3 during the training phase and 100 during the annotation task proper). Texts were randomly selected from a population of 290 community college intending students. An in-depth quality assurance inspection was conducted to assess tagging consistency between annotators and to discern (and address) annotation inaccuracies. Krippendorff’s Alpha (K-alpha) interrater reliability coefficients were calculated, revealing a K-alpha score of k=0.40, which corresponds to a moderate level of agreement, deemed adequate for the complexity and length of the annotation task.

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