2.3. Formative assessment and teaching L2 writing
2.3.1. Some issues regarding to assessing a written work
The way which teachers respond to students’ writing can be considered one of the most important facets because it helps students learn and improve their writing skills. It means that if students receive suitable responses for their work, they can learn and make progress from what they have written.
Nevertheless, there has been an inconclusive debate about how to effectively response to students’ written work. For the ways of approaching a written work, generally speaking there are two basic approaches of assessing writing skill: the product approach and the process approach. The question of whether adopting the product approach or the process approach has caused much debate in over the years. According to Cohen (1990), teachers often treat students’
writing as a final product and make suggestions of correcting grammar and
spelling while students are more interested in comments on content and organization or in how communication is attempted. In the last years, educational research has provided ample support for the assertion that only commenting without correction increased writing fluency and language proficiency (Semke, 1984). Moreover, in the results of a survey of student attitudes, most negative comments came from students who received some kinds of correction; the students who received comments on the content and no corrections commented most positively.
2.3.1.1.1. The product approach
Normally, teachers often teach writing as a product and as a result, their critical attentions on what students have done (Murray, 1972). Compositions marked up with correcting errors in spelling, agreement, word order, verb endings, etc. (Barnett, 1989) make students “shutter under a barrage of criticism” (Murray, 1972). In his paper, Chastain (1980) developed the claim that the teachers who are so strict of not allowing students to have errors in their writing even though they could do the same in a spoken message would make their students disappointed at the compositions full of mistakes.
Therefore, they are rarely involved in their writing anymore and refuse any teachers’ suggestions or corrections for the papers.
There is an ample support to the Chastain’s statement that concentrating on form and accuracy (grammar and spelling) too soon will destroy the mental activity necessary to generate and communicate ideas. In fact, if teachers correct everything, students may have to deal with a lot of changes and they find hardly to absorb and incorporate (Barnett, 1989).
Therefore, there have been dissenters to the view that assessing a written work should be process-oriented approach.
2.3.1.1.2. The process approach
The drawbacks of assessing writing skill via product approach have propounded the view that if each piece of writing is considered as one version in a progression towards the expression of the student’s ideas, what the students can benefit from it. At that time, writing is regarded as an expression of the mental process it entails and as a means of communication (Barnett, 1989).
Generally speaking, it can be said that the writing process is how we translate ideas into written text. It starts with an idea and the need to develop it, communicate it to an audience, and preserve it. Every writer at every age and at every stage of development of proficiency goes through this process (Freeman, 1998). It indicated that the process of writing, according to each author, is divided into different stages.
According to Rohman (1965), writing is a process of prewriting, writing and rewriting. However, this process is not a linear one, yet complex. Three stages interact and influence with each other constantly since the writer move their thoughts when they involve in the writing process. Moreover, the amount of time of a writer spends in each stage depends on each writer’s personality, work habits, maturity and the challenge (Murray, 1972).
Tomkins (2004) is in favor of Rohman, however, he split the writing process into smaller ones, i.e. prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing.
He believed that the more students learn how to use this process efficiently, the more they can express themselves efficiently. Consequently, for writing as a process approach, the teachers become a facilitator rather than a judge and students assume greater control over what they write, how they write it, and the evaluation of their own writing (Barnett, 1989).
It seems that the approach that focuses on the process of writing is considered to be more effective than the old-fashioned product approach for the fact that it can help students develop a more conscious, communicative and realistic approach to writing. Moreover, teachers can involve students much more in the activity because most of the ideas used in the compositions come from the students themselves.
2.3.1.2. Assessing a written work
While planning activities helps students develop their writing skills, assessing their written work helps teachers check the students’ progress and identify specific problems. However, as discussed above, students prefer to be given comments on the content and no corrections from teachers than to be received some kinds of correction (Barnett, 1989). This has fostered debate on how to give an effective comment on written work. Thus designing a specific and reliable correction system is very necessary because it serves as a foundation for teachers to give comments on written work. As far as concerned, the judgment of student work is inevitably a subjective one on the teacher’s part. To reduce teacher bias and increase the value of assessment, a clear set of criteria must be identified and then applied consistently to each student’s samples of writing. Becker (2010) put forward the claim that a scoring rubric acts as a useful guide for evaluating the quality of students’ written responses.
A rubric is usually a one or two page document which lists criteria and describes varying levels of quality, from excellent to poor, for a specific assignment (Goodrich, 1997). A good rubric describes the kinds of mistakes students tend to make, as well as the ways in which good work shines.
Therefore, it can give students valuable information about the task they are about to undertake, their learning targets as well as what counts as high quality work.
There are two main types of scoring rubrics, i.e. analytic scoring and holistic scoring. According to Becker (2010), analytic scoring includes individual traits, or components, of written expression. An analytic scoring rubric typically includes several writing components, such as accuracy, cohesion, content, organization, register, and appropriateness of language conventions, with each component being scored separately. Analytic scoring allows the raters to focus on various aspects of an individual’s writing and score some traits higher than others. On the other hand, Becker (2010) held the view that holistic scoring takes the entire written response into account to assign an overall score for the performance. Holistic scoring generally places an emphasis on what is done well and not on what is lacking or deficient.
Because there are two types of scoring rubrics, when choosing scoring rubrics to measure L2 writing, the distinction between measuring proficiency and achievement is essential for deciding what should be included in the rubrics (Becker, 2010). Due to the characteristics of formative assessment, analytic rubric is preferred as it can point out the weak and strong points of students in each writing piece. Thanks to that, they will know how to improve their writing skill based on the feedback from teacher as well as their peers.