Review of chapter 9 : Testing Writing

Subject: Testing and Evaluation

Name: Zafar ullah jamali (136)

Class: BS IV-linguistics (evening)

Review
Chapter NO:9 Testing Writing
This chapter focuses on multi facet ways to examine writing skill of the
candidates and also makes aware of problems and provide possibilities to
overcome situations.
To ensure a good writing test, it’s cornerstone to get candidates to write first.
There are two ways to assess writing:
1. Direct test
2. Indirect test
Indirect tests are not reliable, there may be probabilities of inaccuracy and
inappropriateness in indirect way of testing writing. Therefore, direct writing
test has more accuracy than indirect tests.
To test writing directly, this chapter provides us three aspects of testing
problems:
1. We should implement writing tasks that properly examine, what we
expect the students would be able to perform
2. Tasks should bring out valid writing samples.
3. Score of samples of writing should be valid and reliable.
Addressing first problem, we have to identify some test specifications, in order
to judge whether tasks assess, what we expect of.
Following are possible content specifications for writing tests.
· Operations
· Type of text
· Addressees of text
· Topics
· Dialect and length
In terms of content validity, we may say the ideal test is one that examines all
relevant potential ability of candidates. The whole score obtained , that is, sum
of different tasks, it would predict the accurate ability of the candidate.
 Turning to the second problem of writing test, this would be misleading if we
say the same task will be perfectly valid and appropriate for all candidates.
Therefore, we have to offer as many tasks to estimate the ability of candidates
. Each task would represent a new start, then validity will be achieved and
balance would be established between desirable and practical. Last not least
thing is that candidates should know, what is required of them to answer or
react to the task.
Finally, we have third and last problem to state. This chapter suggests possible
ways to overcome the unreliability and invalidity of test scoring. Therefore, we
have to generate appropriate scale for scoring and we have to use a calibrate
scale. Acceptable scoring procedure should be followed.
There are two basic approaches to scoring:
1. Holistic scoring
2. Analytical scoring
Former is impressionistic scoring, the tester gives score as a whole of a task
regardless different grammatical structures. It is used for specific purposes.
The second one is based on separate score for each of a number of aspects of
tasks.
The scorer should be trained in order to provide validity and reliability in whole
testing process.