Language Assessment

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Language Assessment

• Chap. 9 Assessing Writing

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Genres of Writing

• 1. Academic writing
• Papers and general reports/essays,
  compositions/academically focused
  journals/theses/dissertations
• 2. Job-related writing
• Messages/letters, emails/memos/reports/labels/sign
  s/advertisements/announcements
• 3. Personal writing
• Greeting cards/invitations/notes/tax
  forms/diaries/fiction/personal journals

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Types of Writing Performance

• 1. Imitative It is a level at which learners are
  trying to master the mechanics of writing. Form
  (letters, words, punctuation, and brief
  sentences) is the primary while context and
  meaning are of secondary concern.
• 2. Intensive It includes skills in producing
  appropriate vocabulary, collocations, idioms, and
  correct grammatical features. Most assessment
  tasks are concerned with a focus on form.

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• 3. Responsive At this level, form-focused
  attention is mostly at the discourse level, with
  a strong emphasis on context and meaning.
  Assessment tasks require learners to connect
  sentences into a paragraph and create a sequence
  of two or three paragraphs.
• 4. Extensive Extensive writing requires using
  all the processes and strategies of writing to
  write an essay, a term paper, a project report,
  or even a thesis.

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Imitative Writing

• 1. copying There is nothing innovative or modern
  about directing a test-taker to copy letters or
  words.
• Example (Copy the words)
• bit bet but gin din pin
• ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
• Listening cloze selection tasks Test takers
  listen a passage and then write the missing words
• (p. 222)

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• 3. Picture-cued tasks Familiar pictures are
  displayed, and test-takers are told to write the
  word that the picture presents.
• 4. Form completion tasks The use of a simple
  form (registration, application, etc.) that asks
  for name, address, phone number, and other data.
• 5. Converting numbers and abbreviations to words
• 900 _______ 545 ___________
• Tues. _______ 5/3 ____________
• 726 S. Main St. _________________

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Spelling Tasks Detecting Phoneme-Grapheme
Correspondences

• Spelling tests
• Picture-cued tasks
• Multiple-choice techniques
• Example
• He washed his hands with ______
• A. soap B. sope C. sop D. soup
• Matching phonetic symbols
• d/e/ ____ l /ai/ /k/ ______

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Intensive Writing

• The same as controlled writing or guided writing.
  At this level, students produce language to
  display their competence in grammar, vocabulary
  or sentence formation, and not necessarily to
  convey meaning for an authentic purpose.
• Dictation and Dicto-Comp
• Dictation is the rendition in writing of what one
  hears aurally.

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• Dicto-comp A paragraph is read at normal speed,
  usually two or three times then the teacher asks
  students to rewrite the paragraph from the best
  of their recollection.
• Variation The teacher, after reading the
  passage, distributes a handout with key words
  from the paragraph as cues for students.

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Grammatical Transformation Tasks

• The tasks are
• Change the tenses in a paragraph.
• Change full forms of verbs to reduced forms.
• Change statements to yes/no or wh-questions.
• Change questions into statements.
• Combine two sentences into one using a relative
  pronoun.
• Change from active to passive voice.

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Picture-Cued Tasks

• Short sentences. A drawing of some simple action
  is shown the test-taker writes a brief sentence.
  (p. 227)
• Picture description. Using the prepositions on ,
  over, under, next to, around to describe as in a
  picture on p. 192.
• Picture sequence description. A sequence of three
  to six pictures depicting a story line can
  provide a suitable stimulus for written task.
  (p.228)

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• Vocabulary Assessment Tasks
• The major techniques used to assess vocabulary
  are (a) defining and (b) using a word in a
  sentence.
• Ordering Tasks
• Reordering words in a sentence
• 1. cold/winter/is/weather/the/in/the
• 2. Studying/what/you/are
• 3. next/clock/the/the/is/picture/to

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Short-Answer Sentence Completion Tasks

• Example
• 1. A Whos that ? B ___________ Gina.
• A Wheres she from? B ____________ Italy.
• 2. Write three sentences describing your
  preferences 6a a big, expensive car or a
  small, cheap car 6b a house in the country or
  an apartment in the city 6c money or good
  health.
• 6a.________ 6b.______ 6c.__________

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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.
• Writers become involved in composing, real
  writing, as opposed to display writing.

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• 1. Authenticity. Assessment is typically
  formative, not summative, and positive washback
  is more important than practicality and
  reliability.
• 2. Scoring. Not only the form abut 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.

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Designing responsive Extensive Writing

• Paraphrasing. It is to say something in ones own
  words. It can avoid plagiarizing and offer some
  variety in expression. Scoring is judged by how
  the test-taker conveys the same or similar
  message, with discourse, grammar, and vocabulary
  as secondary evaluations.
• Guided Question and Answer
• The test administrator poses a series of
  questions which serve as an outline of the
  emergent written text.

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Guided Written Stimuli

• 1. Where did this story take place? (setting)
• 2. Who were the people in the story?
• 3. What happened first? And then? And then?
• 4. Why did _________ do _______ (reasons)?
• 5. What did ____ think about ____? (opinion)
• 6. What happened at the end? (climax)
• 7. What is the moral of the story? (evaluation)

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Paragraph Construction Tasks

• Assessment of paragraph development takes on the
  following forms.
• 1. Topic sentence writing. The writing of a topic
  sentence (its presence/absence, its effectiveness
  in stating the topic).
• 2. Topic development within a paragraph. Four
  criteria to assess the quality
• The clarity of expression of ideas/ the logic of
  the sequence and connections/the cohesiveness or
  unity/the overall effectiveness or impact

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• 3. Development of main and supporting ideas
  across paragraphs. The elements in evaluating a
  multi-paragraph essay
• Addressing the topic, main idea, or principal
  purpose.
• Organizing and developing supporting ideas
• Using appropriate details to undergird supporting
  ideas.
• Showing facility and fluency in the use of
  language.
• Demonstrating syntactic variety.

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Strategic Options

• 1. Attending to task. A set of directives is
  stated or implied by the teacher or the
  conventions of the genre. Four types
  compare/contrast, problem/solution, pros/cons,
  and cause/effect.
• 2. Attending to genre. Reports, Summaries of
  readings/lectures/videos, Responses to
  readings/lectures/videos, Narration, description,
  persuasion/argument, and exposition, Interpreting
  statistical, graphic data, Library research
  paper.

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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 30-minute time limit and
  are not able to prepare ahead of time.

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Sample TWE Topic

• Some people say that the best preparation for
  life is learning to work with others and be
  cooperative. Others take the opposite view and
  say that learning to be competitive is the best
  preparation. Discuss these positions, using
  concrete examples of both. Tell which one you
  agree with and explain why.

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Six Steps to Maximize success on the TWE

• 1. Carefully identify the topic.
• 2. Plan your supporting ideas.
• 3. In the introductory paragraph, restate the
• topic and state the organizational plan.
• 4. Write effective supporting paragraphs.
• 5. Restate your position and summarize in
• the concluding paragraph.
• 6. Edit sentence structure rhetorical
• expression. (Scoring Guide p. 239)

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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.

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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

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Primary trait Scoring

• If the purpose or function of an essay is to
  persuade the reader to do something, the score
  for the writing would rise or fall on the
  accomplishment of that function.
• Organization, supporting details, fluency,
  syntactic variety, and other features will also
  be evaluated.
• Advantage focus on function.

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Analytic Scoring

• Classroom evaluation of learning is best served
  through analytic scoring.
• Brown and Bailey (1984) designed an analytic
  scoring scale that specified five major
  categories and five different levels in each
  category, ranging from unacceptable to
  excellent.
• Five categories organization, logical
  development of ideas, grammar, punctuation/spellin
  g/mechanics, and style and quality of expression.
  (p.244-245)

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• Content 30
• Organization 20
• Vocabulary 20
• Syntax 25
• Mechanics 5
• Total 100
• Analytic scoring offers more washback and helps
  to call the writers attention to problem areas,
  but it requires more time for teachers to attend
  to details within each of the categories.

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