Microsoft Word language assessment theory with practice

(2) Isolating Writing 
It is notoriously difficult to isolate and assess only writing. It is almost 
impossible to separate it from skills such as listening and reading. 
According to Brown and Abeywickrama (2019), “the assessment of writing 
implies by definition the assessment of reading as well” since “one cannot 
write a sentence in a language without being able to read the just written 
sentence” (p. 228). What is more, for the students to write texts following 
the exam requirement/rubrics, they need to understand the prompts given to 
them; and the prompts can be either written (i.e., reading) or oral (i.e., 
listening). Therefore, writing test designers should keep in mind that 
assessing writing is almost always integrated with another skill.
(3) The Aim of the Test 
When preparing a writing test, the assessment objectives should be 
clear. All of the aims should be represented together with their weights (i.e., 
how many points will to be allocated to each of them) in the exam rubrics. 
Criteria such as handwriting, spelling, grammaticality of the sentences, 
vocabulary richness, paragraph constructions, originality, logical 

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development of the main idea could be part of the rubrics. While designing 
the rubrics, test writers should be clear about the following points:
(i) How significant each of these constructs is in that specific exam and 
for that writing task? 
(ii) Are the tasks included in the exam allowing students to demonstrate 
their real knowledge and skills?
3.1. Types of Writing Performance 
In the past, the more popular way of assessing writing was ‘implicit 
testing’ (i.e., a technique where the abilities and sub-skills that are believed 
to underlie the skill of writing are tested, e.g., instead of asking test-takers to 
write a paragraph, tasks eliciting information related to their knowledge of 
spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary use, discourse 
etc. are created). Nowadays, however, it is widely accepted that “the best 
way to test people’s writing ability is to get them to write” (Hughes, 2003, 
p. 83) (i.e., direct testing). To ensure that not any other skill or type of 
knowledge is assessed but the ability to write in the foreign language, test 
designers have to observe the following rules (Hughes, 2003; Rakedzon & 
Baram-Tsabari, 2017; Tsagari & Banerjee, 2016; Tsagari & Vogt, 2017): 
(i) Set writing tasks that are proper representatives of the population of 
tasks those students are expected to be able to perform;
(ii) Select or create tasks that elicit valid samples of writing (i.e., which 
truly represent the students’ ability); 
(iii) Train test evaluators and carefully prepare guidelines, rubrics and 
other assessment tools to ensure that the samples of writing can and 
will be scored validly and reliably.
The writing performance of language learners is usually classified into 
four categories (i.e., imitative, intensive, responsive, extensive) depending 
on how long and how creative the written language test takers are expected 
to produce. The categories were introduced by Brown (2004), but they have 
been widely accepted and applied for the classification of assessment 
writing tasks (e.g., Heaton, 1990; Hughes, 2003). In this chapter, we follow 
Brown’s (2004) categorisation of writing tasks for ease of comparison with 

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other resources. However, differently from some previously published work 
(e.g., Brown & Abeywickrama, 2019), we try to show how each of them can 
be used not as summative but as a formative assessment tool.