TITLE: HOW TO ASSESS WRITING SKILLS?

Have you ever asked yourself as teacher of how to assess writing skills of your learners?

At present, every teacher across the globe, whether it’s a teacher of primary or secondary school,
the teacher owns some knowledge about how to assess writing skills in the classroom, or perhaps
most of them have an accurate idea about it, but it is a fact that teachers know by now that this
skills has been assessed for several decades now around the world.

In the same way, assessing writing skills is an essential process, and we as teachers must know that
this process can’t be beneficial as well as profitable in our pupils if their reading skills are not
honed and developed, so we can assess our learners’ writing skills by undertaking a few simple
activities, grade them according to our writing skill, then we record the results from the activities
and develop an action plan addressing how to improve their writing skills if needed.

Nonetheless, in Iquitos city, teachers generally speaking have a major problem altogether when it
comes to assessing writing skills, chiefly because they present some disadvantages and struggles
about how to assess writing skills or simply they opine that this process is unnecessary and
worthless process to conduct, or they just don’t feel the need to carry out this process, as most of
them consider it as one of the dullest and useless processes when it to teaching a foreign
language, and I reckon they feel this way because teachers nowadays are not used to expressing
their ideas, opinions, insights, feelings, emotions by writing texts broadly speaking, so they don’t
feel the need to assess this skill in their students simply merely because it’s not the best way to
learn English, any other foreign language, or even any other type of knowledge in general.

Furthermore, teachers don’t know what kinds of activities to utilize and fulfill so as to assess
writing skills, since most of them don’t know what kind of tasks and activities would be better to
employ to improve our learners’ writing skills according to their level and needs of learning. For all
these reasons, our education in general is very incompetent as well as inefficient, and our foreign
language teachers are so ineffective and mediocre professionals nowadays.

THESIS

In this particular essay I’m going to talk about the following topics that will help and make teachers
realize that the process of assessing learners’ writing skills is important as well as necessary, in
order to make wiser and more beneficial decisions in our classroom that are related to the writing
skills assessing process of our pupils, these topics are the following: Assessing Writing Skills: What
should feedback mainly on: Language? Content? Organization?, 20 tips to give students feedback,
5 research-based tips for providing students with meaningful feedback, 10 time-saving tips for
grading students writing, Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices, The Council of
Europe’s CEFR levels A1 and A2 in the students’ writing performance as well as the descriptions for
creative writing, and tools for developing our students’ writing skills.
 ASSESSING WRITING SKILLS

1. What should feedback be mainly on: Language? Content? , Organization?

In my opinion, it depends on the process of assessment of the teacher: Because it can be focused
in the language, as it’s the most important aspect of the process of writing and what it should be
mainly on. Here, we emphasize the grammar and vocabulary, which is the most important part to
take into account when we assess our pupils, and vocabulary also refers to teach our students not
only word but also chunks, phrases that are useful and can be used on daily basis to communicate
in English.

In the same way, we can focuse on the content and organization to improve our learners’ writing
skills, as here we assess the topic/theme, and also the coherence, cohesion, the main idea of a
paragraph of a specific text.

Should all mistakes be corrected?

In my view, I don’t believe the all need to be corrected, because if do it my students will eventually
become frustrated and demotivated and probably won’t feel like writing again, and we have to be
completely aware of this situation and don’t let this happen. Instead, we only need to encourage
all of them by only correcting a few mistakes.

Should learners rewrite, incorporating corrections?

To my mind, I think they should because by rewriting their written work, they can avoid making the
same mistakes that they could have made the first time.

Should teachers let learners correct or give feedback on each other’s written work?

Absolutely, since I opine that this will be a more beneficial process for them, because by carrying it
out, students will be more conscious about their peers’ mistakes and by noticing them, they can
give in the same way feedback in order for them to improve their written work, because they have
an idea of the mistakes. For example: when a word is missing, students can correct the sentence
by adding the word where it belongs with another colour of pen, they can also correct the
punctuation and spelling of the text if necessary.