Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
ASSESSING ACADEMIC WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Atta Gebril
The American University in Cairo, New Cairo, Egypt
Following the EATAW 2015 theme, this presentation discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with assessing academic writing in higher education. There has been recently a growing trend related to using integrated tasks as an assessment tool in academic writing settings. Integrated assessment refers to the synthesis of information from sources, whether written or oral, while writing a text. These practices are in line with the academic writing literature that has shown university writing tasks involving the use of discourse synthesis. This literature has also shown many benefits for integrated tasks, such as providing background knowledge for writers, and enhancing both test fairness and authenticity. However, integrated tasks come with a host of challenges related to task design and scoring. Instructors usually have a wide range of questions related to this task type: How are integrated tasks different from impromptu independent tasks? What skills do these tasks entail? Why should we use them? What external sources should we include in integrated tasks? What topics are more suitable for this task type? What if students use inappropriate textual borrowing from sources? How to discourage them from doing so? What are the criteria that teachers should use when scoring integrated tasks? What are the features that should be included in scoring rubrics mainly prepared for integrated tasks? How to train teachers for scoring integrated tasks? The presentation will attempt to answer these questions following a learningoriented approach to writing assessment. Sample integrated writing tasks and scoring rubrics will be shared with participants.
References
GEBRIL, A. & PAKANS, L. (2014). Assembling validity evidence for assessing academic writing: Rater reactions to integrated tasks . Assessing Writing, 21 (2). P. 5673.
PLAKANS, L. & GEBRIL, A. (2013). Using multiple texts in an integrated writing assessment: Source text use as a predictor of score. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22. p. 217230.
GEBRIL, A. & PLAKANS, L. (2013). Towards a transparent construct of readingtowrite assessment tasks: The interface between discourse features and proficiency. Language Assessment Quarterly , 10 (1). P. 119.
PLAKANS, L. & GEBRIL, A. (2012). A close investigation of source use in integrated writing tasks. Assessing Writing Journal , 17(1). p. 1834.
GEBRIL, A. (2009). Score generalizability of academic writing tasks: Does one test method fit it all? Journal of Language Testing , 26. p. 507531.