ABSTRACT
Writing assessment is crucial in students’ development of writing competence. It has been argued that subjectivity and implicitness of writing assessment may hinder the communicability of assessment results to students and thus weaken the learning potential of writing assessment. This study applied appraisal theory to analyse two primary school students’ Chinese explanatory texts regarding effective ways to prevent the transmission of influenza. The texts were assessed by the students’ Chinese language teacher, with one getting a higher mark and the other lower. We examined the ways the students expressed attitudinal values, namely affect, judgement and appreciation, the sources of attitudinal values expressed, and words that up-scale or down-scale the attitudes. Findings showed that appreciation of things is commonly used by the students in combination with intensifiers, whereas personal feelings might not be an essential component. The major difference between the two texts is manifested in their choice of engagement, which influenced significantly the focus of the text and the effects of attitudinal words and intensifiers used. Appraisal theory is recommended as an analytical method for Chinese language teachers to differentiate student writing performance by looking into the language of evaluation used by students to convey interpersonal meanings in their essays.
