Assessment writing

 ASSESSING WRITING

Names: Lorena Abril, Elvis Tsukanka

Today, the ability to write has become an indispensable skill in our global literate community. Writing skills, at least at rudimentary levels, is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life and simply taken for granted in literate cultures. In the field of second language teaching, and a half-century ago experts were saying that writing was primarily a conversion for recording speech and for reinforcing grammatical and lexical features of Language. Now we understand the uniqueness of writing as a skill with its own features and conventions. We also fully understand the difficulty of learning.

TYPES OF WRITING PERFORMANCE

Four categories of written performance that capture the range of written production are considered here. Each category resembles the categories defined for the other three skills, but these categories, as always, reflect the uniqueness of the skill area.

I. Imitative. To produce written language the learner must attain skills in the fundamental, basic tasks of writing letters, words, punctuation, and very brief sentences. This category includes the ability to spell correctly and to perceive phoneme-grapheme correspondences in the English spelling system.

2. Intensive (controlled). Beyond the fundamentals of imitative writing skill in producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocations, and idioms and correct grammatical features up to the length of a sentence.

3 Responsive. Here, assessment tasks require learners to perform at a limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph, and creating a logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs. Tasks respond to pedagogical direct, lists of criteria, outlines, and other guidelines.

4. Extensive. Extensive writing implies the successful management of all processes and strategies of writing for all purposes up to the length of an essay, a term paper, a major research project report, or even a thesis. Writers focus on achieving a purpose, organizing and developing ideas logically, using details to support or illustrate ideas, demonstrating syntactic and lexical variety, and many cases, engaging in the process of multiple drafts to achieve a final product.  

MICRO- AND MACROSKILLLS OF WRITING

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS IMITATIVE WRITING

•  Tasks in (Hand] Writing Letters, Words, and Punctuation: First, a comment should be made on the increasing use of personal and laptop computers and handheld instruments for creating written symbols. Handwriting has the potential of becoming a lost art as even very young children are more and more likely to use a keyboard to produce writing.

• Spelling Tasks and Detecting Phoneme Grapheme Correspondences: A number of task types are in popular use to assess the ability to spell words can recently and to process phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

1.Spelling test.  In a traditional, old-fashioned spelling test, the teacher d bates a simple list of words one word at a time, followed by the word in a sentence repeated again with a pause for test-takers to write the word. Scoring emphasizes correct spelling. 

2. Picture-cued tasks. Pictures are displayed with the objective of focusing oo familiar words whose spelling may be unpredictable Items are chosen according to the objectives of the assessment, but this form is an opportunity to present some challenging words and word pairs:boot/book. 

3. Multiple choices. Pred words and phrases in the form of multiple-choice task risk crossing over into the domain of assessing reading, but if be up writing component, they can serve formative reinforcement of spelling conventions. 

4. Matching phonetic symbols. If students have become familiar with the phonetic alphabet, they could be shown phonetic symbols and asked to write them rectly spelled words alphabetically.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTENSIVE

(CONTROLLED) WRITING

This next level of writing is what second language teacher training manuals have for decades called controlled writing. It may be thought of as form-focused writing, grammar writing, or imply guided writing. A good deal of writing at this level is display writing as opposed to real writing: students produce language to display their competence in grammar, vocabulary, or sentences formation, and not necessarily to convey meaning for an authentic/vocabulary test has plenty of display writing in it, since the response mode demonstrates only the test -taker’s ability to combine or use words correctly.

• Dictation and Dicto-Comp: Dictation was described as an assessment of the integration of listening and writing, but it was clear that the primary skill being assessed is listening. Because of its response mode, however, it deserves a second mention. Dictation is simply the rendition in writing of what one hears aurally, so it could be classified as an imitative type of writing, especially since a proportion of the test-takers performance centers on correct spelling. 

• Grammatical Transformation Tasks: In the heyday of structural paradigms of language teaching with slot-filler techniques and slot substitution drills, the practice of making grammatical transformations-orally or in writing- was very popular. To this day, language teachers have also used this technique as an assessment of the task, ostensibly to measure grammatical competence.

  Numbers verse of the task at possible.

   Change the tenses in a paragraph.

  Change full films of verbs to reduced forms (contractions).

  Change statements to yes/no wh questions.

  Change questions into statements one using a relative pronoun.

  Change direct speech to indirect speech.

  Change from active to passive voice.

• Picture Cued Tasks: A variety of picture cod controlled tasks have been used in English classes around the world. The main advantage of this technique is in detaching the almost ubiquitous reading and writing connection and offering instead a nonverbal means to stimulate written responses.

• Ordering Tasks: One task ut the sentence level may appeal to those who are fond of word games and puzzles ordering (or reordering) scrambled set of words into a complete sentence Here is the way the item format appears.

ISSUES IN ASSESSING RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

Responsive writing creates the opportunity for test-takers to offer an array of posible creative responses within a pedagogical or assessment framework: test taker are responding to a prompt or assignment. Freed from the strict control of intensive writing, learners can exercise a number of options in choosing vocabulary, grammar, and discourse, but with some constraints and conditions Criteria now begin to include the discourse and rhetorical conventions of paragraph structure and of conecting two or three such paragraphs in texto limited length. The learner is responsible for accomplishing a purpose in writing, for developing a sequence of connected ideas and for empathizing with an audience

The genres of text that are typically addressed here are:

• short reports (with structured formats and conventions)
• responses to the reading of an article or story;
• summaries of articles or stories;
• brief narratives or descriptions; and 
• interpretations of graphs, tables and charts.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING 

In this section, we consider both responsive and extensive writing tasks. They will be regarded here as a continuum of possibilities ranging from lower-end task whose complexity exceeds those in the previous category of intensive or controlled writing, through more open-ended tasks such as writing short reports, essays, summaries, and responses, up to texts of several pages or more.

• Paraphrasing: One of the more difficult concepts for second language learners to grasp is paraphrasing. The initial step in teaching paraphrasing is to ensure that learners understand the importance of paraphrasing: to say something in one's own words, to avoid plagiarizing, to offer some variety in expression. With those possible motivations and purposes in mind, the test designer needs to elicit a paraphrase of a sentence or paragraph, usually not more.                          Scoring of the test taker's response is a judgment call in which the criterion of conveying the same or similar message is primary, with secondary evaluations of discourse, grammar, and vocabulary. Other components of analytic or holistic scales (see discussion below page 242) might be considered as criteria for evaluation. Paraphrasing is more often a part of informal and formative assessment than of formal, summative assessment, and therefore student response would be viewed as opportunities for teachers and students to gain positive washback on the art of paraphrase.
•  Guided Question and Answer: Another lower-onder task in this type of writing, which has the pedagogical benefits of guiding a learner without dictating the form of the output, is a guided question and answer format in which the test administrator poses a series of questions that essentially serve as an outline of the emergent written text. In the writing of a narrative that the teacher has already covered in a class discussion, the following kinds of questions might be posed to stimulate a sequence of sentences.
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