1. Assessing Writing
Writing skill at least at rudimentary levels, is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life and is simply taken for granted in literate cultures.

2. Contents Micro-skills vs. macro-skills Types of writing
Scoring writing
Holistic scoring
Analytic scoring
Objective scoring

3. Genres of written language
1. Academic writing
2. job-related writing
3. Personal writing
Theses, shopping list, phone messages , diaries, advertisements, compositions
The most common genres that a second language writer might produce, within and beyond the requirements of a curriculum

4. Micro-skills vs. Macro-skills
Phoneme-grapheme correspondences
Mechanics such as spelling and punctuation
Word order patterns, grammatical systems, & rules
Cohesive devices in written discourse
Macro-skills:
Rhetorical modes, communicative functions & purposes
Main/supporting ideas, new/given info., generalization/exemplification
Literal & implied meanings
Culturally specific references
Prewriting devices, paraphrases, synonyms, drafting, feedback, revising, and editing
We turn once again to a taxonomy of micro-and macroskills that will assist you in defining the ultimate criterion of an assessment procedure. The earlier microskills apply more appropriately to imitative and intensive types of writing task, while the macroskills are essential for the successful mastery of responsive and extensive writing.

5. Types of Writing (1) Imitative (micro-skills):
Mechanics of writing: fundamental, basic tasks of writing letters, words, punctuation, and short sentences
Focus on form.
Handwriting letters, words, and punctuation
Copying
Listening cloze selection task
Spelling tasks and detecting phoneme
Spelling/ multiple-choice reading-writing spelling tasks
Matching phonetic symbols (p. 225)
Imitative writing: the rudiments of forming letters, words, and simple sentence.
Spelling tasks – disadvantages – students don’t recognize the phonetic alphabet or use it in their daily routine. Advantages – it helps students to perceive the relationship between phonemes and graphemes.

6. Types of Writing Intensive/controlled (micro-skills):
Sentence production: proper vocabulary, collocations, idioms, grammar
Still focus on form, with some concern about meaning and context
It is called controlled writing and also be thought of as form-focused writing, grammar writing, or simply guided writing. A good deal of writing at this level is display writing as opposed to real writing: students produce language to display their competence in grammar, vocabulary, or sentence formation, and not necessarily to convey meaning for an authentic purpose. The traditional grammar/vocabulary test ahs plenty of display writing in it.

7. Intensive Writing Assessment
Dictation and Dicto-com
Grammatical Transformation Tasks (p. 226)
Change the tenses in a paragraph
Change the statement to yes/no questions
Picture-cued tasks
Short sentences
Picture description
Picture sequence description
Vocabulary Assessment Tasks
Reordering words in a sentence
Short-answer and sentence completion tasks

8. Dictocomp A variation on the traditional dictation procedure
T reads while Ss listen carefully
Ss write a summary (not word for word as in dictation)
Decide scoring criteria (Bailey 151)
Rationale:
Meaning-oriented
Conveying & capturing meaning = key component of communication

9. Types of Writing (2) Responsive (macro-skills):
Paragraph writing: narratives, descriptions, short reports, lab reports, summaries, responses to reading, interpretations of charts/graphs
Guided question and answer
Paragraph construction tasks
Emphasis on context and meaning
Extensive (macro-skills):
All-purpose essay writing
Term paper, research project report, thesis
Process of multiple drafts

10. Scoring Writing
Holistic scoring
Analytical scoring
Objective scoring

11. Holistic Scoring (1)
A single scale is used to describe different levels of writing performance.
Not to think about the individual components of the writing skill or to count the number of errors in the writing.
The rater reacts to the writing as a whole.
A single score is given.
E.g., on a scale of 1 ~ 10.
Focuses more on communication; overall impression; e.g.,TOEFL’s TWE (Brown 239; Bailey 187)

12. Holistic Scoring (2) Advantages Fast Higher inter-rater reliability
Easily understood by teachers and students alike
Widely applicable to writing across different disciplines
Emphasizes the writer’s strengths
Holistic scoring- TWE 1-6 point, each point on a holistic scale is given a systematic set of descriptors, and the reader-evaluator matches an overall impression with the descriptors to arrive at a score.

13. Holistic Scoring (3) Disadvantages (Brown 242)
One score masks differences across individual composition or the subskills within each score.
No diagnostic info. Is available (no washback).
The scale may not apply equally well to all genres of writing.
Raters need to be extensively trained to use the scale accurately.
In general, teachers and test designers lean toward holistic scoring only when it is expedient for administrative purpose.

14. Training Procedure Norming process: Familiarization with the scale
Read several benchmark papers & discussing how they relate to the scale
Raters independently read a mixed set of papers and score them.
Comparison of scores awarded by all raters
Discuss discrepancies
Another set of papers is read & scored.

15. Primary Trait Scores
Focuses on “how well students can write within a narrowly defined range of discourse”
A four-point scale ranging from zero to 4.
The accuracy of the account of the original (summary)
The clarity of the steps of the procedure and the final result (lab report)
The description of the main features of the graph (the graph description)
The expression of the writer’s opinion (response to an article)
This type of scoring emphasizes the task at hand and assigns a score based on the effectiveness of the text’s achieving that one goal

16. Analytic Scoring (1)
“Embodies hypotheses about the underlying constructs that comprise a given skill,” or evaluate separately various components
Assessing Ss’ performances on a variety of categories
E.g., 5 components:
Content 13 ~30 points
Organization 7 ~ 20 points
Vocabulary 7 ~20 points
Language use 5 ~25 points
Mechanics 2 ~5 points

17. Analytic Scoring (2) Why called “analytical scoring?”
Because scale designers have analyzed the hypothesized components of the writing skill, and it’s these components that make up the categories used in scoring

18. Analytic Scoring (3) Evaluating separately various components:
Points-off, or weighted score, or split grade
Scoring profile: based on five components
Content
Organization
Vocabulary
Language use
Mechanics