Teaching Journal: Classroom Approaches to ESL Writing Assessment

Authors and summary: This is chapter eight from Teaching ESL Composition by Ferris and Hedgecock.

• PROSPECTS AND PITFALLS IN L2 WRITING ASSESSMENT: MEASUREMENT TOOLS AND PARTICIPANT ROLES
• PRINCIPLES OF TASK RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY (Glenn et al., 2003; Henning, 1991; Byrd & Nelson, 1995)
• APPROACHES TO SCORING IN ESL WRITING
• Holistic Scoring (Cohen, 1994)
• Analytic Scoring (Casanave, 2004)
• Primary and multiple trait scoring (Douglas, 2000)
• PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT (Yancy, 1992; Johns, 1997; Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000, p. 34)
• PRACTICAL CONCERNS IN ASSESSING STUDENT PERFORMANCE
• Managing the workload
• Paper grading anxiety
• Assigning course grades
• SUMMARY

Thoughts: I really like the idea of portfolio grading. It is much more inline with process oriented teaching and autonomous decision making on the part of the students. I want to learn much more about how to design courses around a portfolio, as I am not confident from this one reading that I could effectively implement in the classroom. However, it definitely hits me as a stronger option for assessing student work.