Effectiveness of ESL students' performance by computational assessment and role of reading strategies in courseware-implemented business translation tasks

This study reports on investigating students' English translation performance and their use of reading strategies in an elective English writing course offered to senior students of English as a Foreign Language for 100 minutes per week for 12 weeks. A courseware-implemented instruction combined with a task-based learning approach was adopted. Based on the same source texts in Chinese, students were asked to complete three English translation tasks rooted in real-life business contexts: announcements, sales letters, and public relation reports. A questionnaire about reading strategies was administered at the end of the instruction. Two types of computational assessment were used to evaluate students' translation performance. The results indicated that students' post-translation was quantitatively and qualitatively improved after receiving 12-week's courseware-implemented instruction, such as writing more words, using more different words of high level, enhancing lexical density, and making fewer errors. An independent sample t-test analysis indicated that a significant difference existed between students with higher and lower writing proficiency in two individual reading strategies related to metacognitive strategies that are higher order executive skills.