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Assesing-Writing Summary

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Assesing-Writing Summary

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hajira.sair
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Chapter 9 ASSESING WRITING

1. Academic writing: papers and general subject reports essays, compositions


academically focused journals short-answer test responses technical reports (e.g., lab
reports) theses, dissertations.
2. Job-related writing
Messages (e.g., phone messages) letters/emails memos (e.g., interoffice) reports (e.g., job
evaluations, project reports) schedules, labels, signs, advertisements, announcements
manuals.
3. Personal writing
Letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations messages, notes calendar entries, shopping
lists, reminders financial documents (e.g., checks, tax forms, loan applications) forms,
questionnaires, medical reports, immigration documents diaries, personal journals, fiction
(e.g., short stories, poetry).
Assessing writing: Types of Writing Performance

1. Imitative. Skills in the fundamental, basic tasks of writing letters, words,


punctuation, and very brief sentences. Includes the ability to spell correctly and to
perceive phoneme-grapheme, trying to master the mechanics of writing. Form is
the primary focus, while context and meaning are of secondary concern.
Spelling Tasks and Detecting Phoneme-- Grapheme Correspondences, Spelling
tests (dictado). Picture-cued tasks (word pairs: boot/book, read/reed, bit/bite, etc.)
Multiple-choice techniques. Matching phonetic symbols.

2. Intensive (controlled). Beyond the fundamentals of imitative writing are skills in


producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocations and idioms, and
correct grammatical features up to the length of a sentence. Context are of some
importance in determining correctness and appropriateness, with a focus on form,
and are rather strictly controlled by the test design.

Dictation and Dicto-Comp: A form of controlled writing related to dictation is a dicto-


comp. Here, a paragraph is read at normal speed, then the teacher asks students to
rewrite the form the best of their recollection.
Grammatical Transformation Tasks (Change the tenses in a paragraph, Change full forms
of verbs to reduced forms (contractions) etc.
Picture-Cued Tasks, Picture description (on, over, under, next to, around).
Picture sequence description. A sequence of three to six pictures depicting a story line can
provide a suitable stimulus for written production.
Vocabulary Assessment Tasks, Ordering Tasks, Short-Answer and Sentence Completion
Tasks (limited response).

Authenticity. its face and content validity need to be assured in order to bring out the best
in the writer.

Scoring. Not just to how the writer strings words together (the form) but also to what the
writer is saying (the/unction of the text). The quality of writing (its impact and
effectiveness).

Time.

3. Responsive: 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 directives, lists
of criteria, outlines, and other guidelines. Genres of writing include brief narratives
and descriptions, short reports, lab reports, summaries, brief responses to reading,
and interpretations of charts or graphs. The writer has mastered the fundamentals
of sentence-level grammar. Form-focused attention is mostly at the discourse level,
with a strong emphasis on context and meaning.
4. Extensive. Extensive writing implies successful management of all the 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 in many
cases, engaging in the process of multiple drafts to achieve a final product. Focus on
grammatical form is limited to occasional editing or proofreading of a draft.

ISSUES IN ASSESSING RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

 Responsive Writing: test-takers are “responding” to a prompt or assignment.


 Learners can choose among vocabulary, grammar and discourse, but with some
constraints and conditions.
 Criteria include discourse and rhetorical conventions of paragraph structure and
connecting two or three of them in texts of limited length.
 Genres of texts: short reports, responses of the reading of an article or story,
summaries of articles or stories, brief narratives and descriptions, and
interpretations of graphs, t Extensive, or “free” writing: learners have more
freedom to choose: topics, length, style. Conventions of formatting are less
constrained.
 Genres of texts: full-length essays, term papers, project reports, theses and
dissertations.
 All the rules come into play and the learner is expected to meet all the
standards applied to native language writers tables, and charts.

Micro skills

1. Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.

2. Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.

3. Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns.

4. Use acceptable grammatical systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns,


and rules.

5. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.

6. Use cohesive devices in written discourse.

Macro skills

7. Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse.


8. Appropriately accomplish the communicative functions of written texts according
to form and purpose.

9. Convey links and connections between events, and communicate such relations as
main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization,
and exemplification.

10. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.

11. Correctly convey culturally specific references in the context of the written text.
12. Develop and use a battery of writing strategies, such as accurately assessing the
audience's interpretation, using prewriting devices, writing with fluency in the first
drafts, using paraphrases and synonyms, soliciting peer and instructor feedback,
and using feedback for revising and editing.

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