ABSTRACT
During the pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), English as a foreign language (EFL) students have to study and submit their assignments and quizzes through online systems using electronic files instead of hardcopies. This has created an opportunity for teachers to use computer tools to conduct preliminary assessment of the students' writing performance and then give advice to them timely. Hence, this paper proposed some indicators which were essay readability scored by Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), length of essays, errors in writing and a method to assist the teachers in providing writing feedback to the students. The results showed a large difference in FRE, the number of words, sentences, paragraphs and errors. The K-means clustering findings were applied to classify groups of students based on writing proficiency indicators. The findings also revealed that the number of words and sentences in the essays indicated some deficiencies. The concept of paragraph should be reinforced while some specific errors such as misspelling, grammatical and typographical errors found need to be eliminated. This study showcased that the computer tools should be integrated to process the students' essays so that the teachers can pinpoint the problems and make suggestions to their students in appropriate time. Lastly, the results can be served as the guidelines for the teachers to develop and adjust teaching materials pertinent to writing to enhance the writing performance of EFL learners.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to examine the readability levels of the state departments of education guidance documents regarding COVID-19 protocols for families of students receiving special education services. The authors searched the 50 states and the District of Columbia's departments of education websites for their COVID-19, special education, parental guidance documents for the 2020-2021 school year. Parental guidance documents were available from 90% (46/51) of the department of education websites with 61% (31/51) of those documents specifically designed for parents of children receiving special education services. The researchers used the Flesch Reading Ease (FRES) to analyze the reading level of the 31 documents that the departments of education websites created for families of individuals receiving special education services. The FRES score was 43.05, indicating that the average reading difficulty was "difficult" with a "college reading level." The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) average score for the reviewed documents revealed an average U.S. grade level of 12.34. Thus, documents produced during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly exceeded the appropriate reading level recommended by the current research (Nagro & Stein, 2016). To improve communication and provide caregivers with the necessary information to make informed decisions regarding their children's educational need during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential for parental guidance documents to be written at lower reading levels to accommodate the general population.