Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter IV Assessing Writing

Writing is a high estimated skill especially by employers and higher education. There are multiple tasks which assess writing focusing on the organization of ideas, clarity of the message and mechanics.  There are two main approaches to writing: the indirect measures of writing assessment more related to accuracy than communication, it assesses punctuation, spelling and sentence construction; and the direct measures of writing assessment that assesses communication based on production, integrating all the elements: grammar, content, vocabulary, conventions and syntax.

Consider giving multiple writing assessment tasks and opportunities to the students and test use them. Contextualize tasks for the students’ needs, mark only what is written, evaluate all answers from one question before continuing with the next. Have a systematic approach for dealing with marking discrepancies, get the students involve in their assessment, provide feedback, practice blind marking, and make the necessary adjustments for the marking criteria by using them in practices. Take in to account that writing is a visible skill, so that, the use of rubrics help the teacher to be more objective when scoring.

Some sample techniques for writing are: free writing and guided writing.  Assessment can be done by the Student-teacher conferences, self-assessment, peer assessment and portfolio-based assessment.

When writing specifications, deal with the selection of the rubrics and criteria for writing scales that includes the selection of holistic (more integrating marks) and analytical (specific purposes for writing) scales and select the benchmarks.