2.3. Formative assessment and teaching L2 writing
2.3.2. The application of formative assessment into teaching L2 writing 26 2.4. Some drawbacks of the application of formative assessment in
Graham, Harris, & Hebert (2011, p.7) held the view that “formative assessment makes a difference in how well students convey thoughts and ideas through text. Writing improves when students receive feedback about their written works, students evaluate their writing, and teachers monitor students’
progress.” As an illustration, Gillingham partnership Formative Assessment Project (2002) pointed out standardized test scores in reading and numeracy as
well as writing levels of students considerably enhanced via formative assessment. Additionally, they also noted that such formative assessment will help teacher to measure the effectiveness of his/ her teaching in order to modify it as needed.
Graham, et al. (2011) recommended some ways to use formative assessment to improve students’ writing:
• Provide feedback
• Teach students how to assess their own writing
• Monitor students’ writing progress
Moreover, they suggested some best techniques for assessing writing in the classroom as follows:
• Allow students to use the mode of writing in which they are most proficient when completing a writing assessment
• Minimize the extent to which presentation forms such as handwriting legibility or computer printing bias judgments of writing quality
• Mask the writer’s identify when scoring papers
• Randomly order students’ papers before scoring them
• Collect multiple samples of students’ writing
• Ensure that classroom writing assessment is reliably scored.
Actually, these techniques are based on the features of formative assessment, yet adjusted to make it more suitable for teaching and learning writing. Nevertheless, it also includes three key factors that are mentioned
above, i.e. feedback through grading, self-assessment and peer assessment.
Thus within the scope of this study, these techniques will be incorporated during the teaching process to assess students’ writing skill via three stages (revising, editing and publishing) as follows:
Stage
Techniques
Teacher Students
Revising
- Providing better definitions of requirements using
carefully constructed criteria sheets and performance level definition
- Setting achievement milestones for a task and reflecting back on progress and forward to the next stage of action
- Increasing discussion and reflection about criteria and standards in class
- Workshops where students in collaboration with teacher devise their own assessment criteria for a piece of work - Writing down some “action
- Giving feedback on each other’s work (peer feedback) in relation to defined criteria and standards
- Identifying their own “action points” in class based on the feedback they have just received.
points” alongside the normal feedback they provide. This would identify for students what they should do next time to improve their performance
- Providing students with exemplar assignments with attached feedback
- Asking students to find one or two examples of feedback comments that they found useful and to explain how they helped
- Focusing on students with greatest difficulties
Editing
- Teacher should allow students appropriate period of time to edit their papers - Teacher target specific skills,
such as capitalization or commas. Working on just one or a couple skills prevents student from becoming overwhelmed
- Identifying the strengths and weaknesses in their own work in relation to criteria or
standards before submitting to the teacher
Publishing
- Increasing the number of opportunities for re- submission
- Allocating time for students to re-write selected pieces of work
- Providing feedback soon after a submission
- Providing marks on written work only after students have responded to feedback comments
- Check the progress of a student’s portfolio1.
- Reflecting on their
achievement and selecting work in order to compile a portfolio
Table 2.2: Formative assessment techniques in teaching writing
2.4. Some drawbacks of the application of formative assessment in teaching L2
Although being proved that formative assessment brings teacher and learners a lot of benefits in assessing their teaching and learning, the application of formative assessment into classroom still have some drawbacks.
As Black & Wiliam. (1998, p.20) commented, there were three outstanding features relevant to teachers’ assessment practices:
1 A portfolio is a purposeful collection of significant work, carefully selected, dated and presented to tell
(1) Formative assessment is not well understood by teachers and is weak in practice;
(2) The context of national or local requirements for certification and accountability will exert a powerful influence on its practice;
(3) Its implementation calls for rather deep changes both in teachers’
perceptions of their role in relation to their students and in their classroom practice.
As for students, another problem is that they may fail to recognize formative feedback as a helpful signal and guide (Tunstal & Gipps, 1996).
Moreover, Blumenfel (1992) also pointed out that students might hesitate to ask for help from their teacher as well as friends and be unhappy to receive extra assistance because they believed that that was an evidence of their low ability.
It can be seen that the students’ attitudes towards the application of formative assessment is one of the most essential factors which can affect the success of this application in the classroom. Although there are a lot of studies on the effect of formative assessment in classroom, however, what students think of this issue may be ignored somehow. Therefore, it seems necessary to have a study which focuses on student’s attitudes towards the application of formative assessment in classroom, especially for teaching English writing in order to find out its pros and cons in a specific context; and thanks to that, useful suggestions will be given to enhance the effect of this application in writing lessons.
2.5. Synthesis of literature review
Chapter 2 has reviewed and discussed the literature to the current study, such as teachers’ response to written work, assessing writing skills, the history
and definition of formative assessment. The following figure will summarize the conceptual framework of the current study.
Figure 2.4: Conceptual framework of the study
Specifically, (1) teachers often treat students’ writing as a final product and focus too much on their mistakes while students prefer to be received feedbacks on what they have done well and what they have not in the writing papers, which will demotivate students in learning English writing. (2) Assessment in teaching and learning nowadays mostly serves for the purpose of ranking or accountability; in other words, it is summative assessment.
However, in teaching English writing skill, giving marks without any comments does not give any helpful information for students to identify their achievement. Assessment can become valid when it can promote students’
learning, which is also the difference between summative assessment and formative assessment. It can be seen that any model of formative assessment must take account of the way students make sense of, and use, feedback information. According to Saddler (1989), in order for students to be able to
they must already possess some of the same evaluative skills as their teacher. It means that to enhance the quality of formative assessment, teachers should focus their effort on strengthening the skills of self-assessment and peer assessment in their students. These factors are discussed in detail to serve as the foundation for the application of formative into writing English lessons.
Hence, in the light of benefits of formative assessment as mentioned above, the researcher would like to carry out a study of the application of formative assessment into teaching English writing via three main indicators, i.e. (3) feedback through grading, (4) self-assessment and (5) peer assessment in a writing course. Then the researcher would like to investigate how students at the VUS perceive the use of this application in their writing class.