ABSTRACT
Rating studies conducted in different sociocultural contexts often yield discrepant results about the writing aspects raters focused on and raters’ rating processes. The sociocultural contexts are the external, socially organized, historical, and cultural worlds inseparably linked with raters’ cognition. The cognition is distributed in the individual and in the sociocultural context. Some added sociocultural factors, such as consequences of scoring decisions for test-takers, institutional constraints, test purposes, and raters’ community of practice. The institutional and sociocultural rules together influenced raters’ decision-making and dictated their activities. Looking into the social layer provides nuanced insights into rater decision-making embedded in the sociocultural context. The raters paid the most attention to language quality, and least to writing tidiness; and among language quality, raters most frequently paid attention to syntax or morphology, and least to cohesion and coherence.
