Assessing Writing

Writing test
By
Afriani Indria Puspita
RRA1B214029

Genres of Writing
1. Academic writing
papers, essays compositions, journals, short
answer test responses, thesis.
2. Job-related writing
messages, letters or e-mails, memo,
advertisement, announcements.
3. Personal writing
letters, e-mails, greeting cards, invitation,
notes, shopping list, diaries, fiction.

Types of Writing
Performance

1. Imitative: is a level at which learners are trying to

master the mechanics of writing.
2. Intensive (controlled): skills in producing appropriate
vocabulary within a context, collocations and idioms ,
and correct grammatical features of a sentence.
3. Responsive: Tasks requires learners to perform at a
limit discourse level, connecting sentences into a
paragraph an create a logically connected sequence
of two or three paragraphs.
4. Extensive: Implies successful management of all the
process and strategies of writing for all purposes.
Writers focus on achieving a purpose, organizing and
developing ideas logically.

Micro & Macroskill of Writing

Microskills
1.Produce grapheme and orthographic
pattern
2.Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed
3.Produce an acceptable core of words
4.Use acceptable grammatical system
5.Express a particular meaning
6.Use cohesive device in written discourse

MACROSKILLS
1.Use rhetorical forms and conventions
2.Appropriately accomplish the communication
functions of written text
3.Convey links and connection between events,
and communicate relations as main idea,
supporting idea, new information, given
information, generalization, and exemplification.
4.Distinguish between literal and implied
meaning
5.Correctly convey culturally specific references
in the context of the written text
6.Develop and use a battery of writing
strategies.

Designing Assessment Tasks:

Imitative Writing

1. Tasks in [hand]-Writing Letters, Words and

Punctuation.
Copying
There is nothing innovative or modern about directing a test
taker to copy letters or words.
Listening cloze selection tasks
Test takers listen a passage and then write the missing
words
Picture-cued tasks
tasks Familiar pictures are displayed, and test-takers are
told to write the word that the picture presents.
Form completion tasks
The use of a simple form (registration, application, etc.) that
asks for name, address, phone number, and other data.
Converting numbers and abbreviations to words

2. Spelling Tasks and detecting

Phoneme
Grapheme
Correspondences
spelling test
Picture-cued tasks
Multiple choice techniques
Matching phonetic symbols

Designing
Assessment
(controlled) writing

Tasks:

Intensive

Dictation and Dicto-Comp [L,W]

Dictation is the rendition in writing of what one hears
aurally.
Grammatical Transformation Tasks
Change the tenses in a paragraph, Change statements
to yes/no or wh-questions, Change questions into
statements, Change from active to passive voice.
Pictured-Cued Tasks
Short sentence
Picture description
Picture sequence description
Vocabulary Assessment Tasks
The major techniques used to assess vocabulary are :
defining and
using a word in a sentence.
Ordering Tasks :Reordering words in a sentence
Short-Answer and Sentence-Completion Tasks

Issues in Assessing Responsive and

Extensive Writing

The genres of text here are:

Short reports ; responses to the reading of an article or
story ; summaries of articles or stories ; brief narratives
or descriptions ; interpretations of graphs, tables, and
charts.
1.Authenticity
Assessment is typically formative, not summative, and
positive washback is more important than practicality
and reliability.
2. Scoring
Not only the form but also the function of the text are
important in evaluation.
3. Time
Responsive writing, along with extensive writing, relies
on the essential drafting process for its ultimate success.

Designing Assessment Tasks:

Responsive And Extensive Writing
1. Paraphrasing
Say something in ones own words, avoid
plagiarizing.
Informal and formative assessment
Scoring of the test-takers response is a
judgment call
2. Guided Question and Answer
For writing stimuli
To prompt the test-taker to write from an outline.

3. Paragraph Construction Task

Assessment of paragraph:
Topic sentence writing
Topic development within a paragraph
Development of main and supporting ideas
across paragraphs
4. Strategic options
Attending to task
Attending to genre
5. Standardized test of responsive writing
The example is the Test of Written
English(TWE)

Test of Written English

(TWE)
TWE is a standardized test of writing
ability and has gained a reputation
as a well-respected measure of
written English.
The TWE is a timed impromptu test
in which test-takers are under a 30minute time limit and are not able to
prepare ahead of time.

Scoring Methods for Responsive

and Extensive Writing
Three major approaches to scoring writing
performance: holistic, primary trait, and
analytical.
Holistic: A single score is assigned to an essay.
Primary trait: The achievement of the primary
purpose, or trait, of an essay is the only factor
rated.
Analytical: the written text is broken down into a
number of subcategories (organization, grammar)
and each subcategory gets a separate rating.

Holistic Scoring
Advantages:
Fast evaluation, high inter-rater reliability
easily interpreted by lay persons,
emphasize the writers strengths,
applicability to writing across many
different disciplines
Disadvantages:
No diagnostic information, not equally
well apply to all genres, training in
raters, one score only

Primary trait Scoring

What would assess :
1.The accuracy of the account of the
original (summary).
2.The clarity of the steps of the procedure
and the final result (lab report).
3.The description of the main features of
the graph (graph description).
4.The expression of the writers opinion
(response to an article).

Analytic Scoring
Analytic scoring may be more appropiately
called analytic assessment to capture its
closer assosiation with classroom language
instruction than with formal testing.
Brown and Bailey (1994) designed an
analytical scoring scale that specified five
major categories and a description of five
different levels in each category, ranging
from unacceptable to excellent.

Assesing Initial Stages of the Process of

Composing
1. Focus your efforts primarily on meaning, main idea, and
organization.
2. Comment on the introductory paragraph.
3. Make general comments about the clarity of the main
idea and logic or appropriateness of the organization.
4. As a rule of thumb, ignore minor (local) grammatical and
lexical errors.
5. Indicate what appear to be major (global) errors (e.g., by
underlining the text in question) but allow the writer to
make corrections.
6. Do not rewrite questionable, ungrammatical, or awkward
sentences; rather, probe with a question about meaning.
7. Comment on features that appear to be irrelevant to the
topic.

Assessing Later Stages of the

Process of Composing
1. Comment of the specific clarity and strength of all main
ideas and supporting ideas and on argument and logic.
2. Call attention to minor (local) grammatical and
mechanical (spelling, punctuation) errors but direct the
writer to self-correct.
3. Comment on any further word choices and expression that
may not be awkward but are not as clear or direct as they
could be.
4. Point out any problems with cohesive devices within and
across paragraphs.
5. If appropriate, comment on documentation, citation of
sources, avidence, and other support.
6. Comment on the adequacy and strenght of the conclusion.