A Study on the Impact of Fatigue on Raters’ Comments While Scoring EFL Writing Tasks, and the Relationship between Fatigue and Raters’ Age.

This article is of two main sections. Following the introduction, the first section is an investigation of the effect of fatigue on raters when scoring EFL writing tasks with regard to the type of their comments on each writing task. Section two, however, presents a study touching upon the relationship between raters’ age and the effect of fatigue on them. To this end, 28 Iranian EFL learners, among many others, were selected to write an essay as a writing task. Also, four raters, in two groups regarding their ages, were selected and each given the writing tasks to score and comment on. The writing tasks were already checked to have the same length and to be written by the students of the same writing proficiency. The subjects, the raters in this study, were requested to score the writing tasks without any break during the scoring procedure. With respect to the first part, this study argues that comments, made by raters on scored essays, including ones on grammar, choice of word, punctuation, dictation, capitalization, and organization, are different in number and type from the first few scored essays to the last few ones. Regarding the second part, unlike other studies, results suggest that there is no relationship between raters’ age and the extent to which they are affected by fatigue

کلیدواژه ها:

Fatigue ، Rater Consistency ، Frequency of Comments ، Type of Comments