Group 5

CHAPTER 25: Assessing Writing

The central issue in writing assessment is defining the construct. At lower levels test tasks need to be
simple and not require students to generate new ideas or come up with their own organizational
pattern. At higher levels, more demanding and scoring criteria emphasize on content development and
organization of ideas.

To test or not to test?

Reasons for assessing writing:

- Teachers want to see what students can do without help and ensure the writing they submit is
their own
- Students may face with high-stakes tests in which they need to perform on a timed writing
assessment
- Writing test may function as a measure of automatized language knowledge and give a truer
picture of a student’s proficiency

Qualities of good tests

- Reliability: consistency of measurement. The different topics, testing condition should be as

similar as possible. Apply the criteria consistently to all students
- Validity: measure what we are trying to measure. In terms of task, it is about the content.
Regarding scoring, the criteria to evaluate are clearly in the rubric
- Practicality: the resources required to develop, administer, and score the test cannot exceed the
resources available.

Tasks in writing assessment

These dimensions across which writing assessment tasks vary: subject matter; whether students are
writing from a “bare” prompt or to a picture, reading passage, etc; the cognitive demands of the
prompt; how long students have to respond to the prompt; whether they write on paper or on a
computer.

Scoring

The most important considerations in scoring include: designing or selecting a rating scale or scoring
rubric; selecting and training the people who will be doing the rating.

For classroom assessment, the instructor will be the person who evaluates student writing, but in many
language programs, the tests are scored by other people. Whoever scores the assessment must be
careful to be as consistent as possible, so that the rating is fair to all students

CHAPTER 27 Assessing Speaking

Test Design:

- One - to - one interview: the most traditional and the easiest to use in a classroom test. The drawbacks
are: past performance, the relationship between the two,..
- The student monologue: short talk on a given topic. Teacher can control over the input and over the
length of output.

- The pair or small group interaction: discuss one or more issues. It can examine more than one student
at a time.

- The recorded stimuli setup: record test takers response to a series of questions or short tasks.

The questions or tasks used here can be the same or very similar to those used in the above three setup.

- Self-, peer, or teacher assessment on an individual’s performance in general.

Task Type:

- Reading aloud: for assessing pronunciation and stress. It should not be seen as an indication of a
student’s ability to actually speak.

- Mimicry task: students repeat a series of sentences after the examiner. The results are then recorded
and analyzed.

- Oral presentation: teacher has control over input and output.

- Information transfer task: Students share information provided by the teachers. This can be in the form
of written text, photos, or charts..

- The role-play task: Students take on a specified role in an interaction and are marked on their ability to
maintain the role.

- The interview task: it can be free where the conversation unfolds in an unstructured fashion, or
structured.

- The discussion task: the students are asked to interact among each other to talk about a given subject.

The scoring perspective:

Two broad choices:

- The holistic type: offers a single global score or grade, based on a series of descriptors. The examiner
matches the performance to the closest descriptor.

- The analytic type: the developer first identifies the language operations involved in responding to the
tasks and the attempts to create a making scheme specifically.

Test level:

- Make a set of recording over time and agree which are fails and pass.

- Use a well-trusted set of standards and identify the level through the written descriptors.

The rating plan:

- Make a plan for where, when, and how the marking will be done.

- All of the scoring is done under the same conditions.