Assessing Foreign or Second Language Writing Ability

I read an article titled Assessing Foreign or Second Language Writing Ability by Christine Coombe. In line with the title, assessing, I thought that this article talks about the kind of assessment in assessing writing skill, and the instrument may be used to assess students’ writing ability in foreign or second language.

As I know, assessing second/ foreign language writing skill is the complicated one. I have already experienced some kind of assessment, such as self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher assessment. However, as a student, when doing self or peer assessment, actually I do not really understand what aspect that I should assess. Moreover, I do not know the guideline to assess writing.

In this article, Christine Coombe explain about the design of the test, it can be direct or indirect; test administration, it is including test delivery mode and time allocation; the design of assessment, like rubric, prompt, expected response, post-task evaluation, and topic restriction; ways to assess writing, those are student-teacher conference, self-assessment, peer assessment, and portfolio; and the effect on pedagogy.

Christine Coombe herself is the President-Elect of TESOL. She has published in the areas of language assessment, teacher effectiveness, language teacher research, task-based learning and leadership in English language teaching.