APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
EVALUATION
Assessing productive skills (writing and speaking)
Scoring productive writing tests
Earlier written pieces of work were marked based on the tester’s impression of the language output, which is a fully subjective way, consequently very unreliable. In modern communicative testing we can speak of improved subjective scoring, which means that scoring is made reliable by detailed marking schemes, in which language performance is assessed based on certain categories and subcategories to which marks are assigned. Usually there are three main categories of language performance to be scored: content (the required information included, irrelevant info excluded, content complete, message appropriate), language (accuracy, proportion of errors, vocabulary size, good range of language, accurate spelling and punctuation), and text (style, register and format, textual organization and cohesion, suitable layout)
Another way of assessing written language performance is the use of yardsticks or scales, which means a set of bands which cover the whole range of language performance from non-user to expert user. Each band has a descriptor of the expected performance in the given band. These descriptors are phrased in real-world terms, which are more meaningful. In practice there are different yardsticks for each skill and they might have separate descriptors for different marking criteria.
