Communicational Model: Typology of Academic Writing Assessment in Spanish in Higher Education

Abstract

A common diagnosis in the literature is that the writing of Spanish speakers is generally a structural problem. The writing of 81 university students was analysed by classifying the teacher’s comments based on 11 variables that were recorded once during a continuous evaluation that supported the assessment. The techniques used were Content Analysis, Cluster Analysis and Self-Study. Four Clusters were identified in which the dominant conception of communication is broken down, while one Cluster was identified with the alternative conception of communication. This expresses compliance with the task instructions, while the remaining Clusters show progressive non-compliance in various measures. The five Clusters form a typology and, with the theoretical assumption of the identification of the respective conceptions, correspond to a situated communication model. It could be applied in the planning of teaching workloads, as well as in the semi-automatic checking of written productions through the implementation of AI solutions.

Keywords

• Communication theory
• writing evaluation
• Spanish language
• open university
• individualized teaching
• multivariate analysis