1. Assessing Writing
I would like to start my intervention saying that I had a lot of expectations from this
reading, because I consider that I have many things to learn and apply to assess
writing correctly, using meaningful and suitable tasks thathelpstudents improving
their writing skills integrally. However, some centuries ago, writing was exclusively
domain of scribes and scholars in religious intuitions as Brown pointed out in his
book .As a result, the lack of knowledge and interest towards this skill. Nowadays,
it is considered an important ability that plays a crucial role in knowing how people
perceive the outer world and its language putting it into words.
Although some improvements are being observed throughout the years, it is
important to keep in mind that assessing writing is not a simple task. We need to
have clear an objective. For example, what is it you want to test? Handwriting
ability? Correct spelling? Paragraph construction? Because, many teachers tend to
assess writing without designing a task which take into account certain specific
elements a learner should provide in the text, such as: spelling, word order,
coherence, cohesion, grammatical structure etc. or without giving an enrich
feedback to students.
However, in order to develop useful tasks, it is needed to name the different
genres of written language (academic, job-related, and personal writing) so that
context and purpose are clear, types of writing (imitative, intensive, responsive,
and extensive)so that stages of the development of writing are represented, and
micro- and macro skills so that objectives can be pointed precisely. Having
these clear, it is possible to employ valuable and constructive tasks according to
students’ level and needs according to his/he process.
To sum up, writing is not an isolate skill due to the fact that it involves grammatical
features, knowledge about the language, vocabulary, and reading ability. Because,
in many cases you first read, then you write. Moreover, writing embodies text
organization, coherence and cohesion. There are many processes occurring in a
short period of time. For that reason, teachers need to provide different tasks to
encourage them to explore their creativity, imagination and inspiration for writing
without feeling force to produce a text.