Writing Skills Testing and Assessment Research Assignment

Writing Skills Testing and Assessment
Your Name
September 29, 2016
Your Institution of Affiliation
Writing Skills Test
—O—
General description
One of the most important considerations that test-makers should remember in creating a test is ‘usefulness’. This aspect should be evaluated even before drafting the test itself since doing this would help to eliminate any wasted time and energy in creating inaccurate and inadequate test questionnaires that would fail to assess the things that it tries to measure in the first place CITATION Bac96 \l 1033 (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). In this section, usefulness is given much consideration in creating a Writing skills test. In order to do this, two tasks are strategically employed in order to completely capture the student’s writing skill and knowledge.
Specific objective:
Writing task 1:
The first task aims to assess and help the students write logical, comprehensible, varied, and grammatically correct sentences. The main goal of this task is to assess the student’s skills in writing a letter or a note to a friend.
Writing task 2:
This would be done in the form of an ‘open-ended-story-telling manner’ to capture their attention fully and so that they can use it immediately in day-to-day settings. More particularly, this is to (1) assess the student’s ability to make, accept, and decline an invitation, and (2) to utilize the use of ‘might’.
Sample items:
WRITING TASK 1 – STORY TELLING
Briefly answer in one (1) paragraph (100 words)
* Write an invitation for a special event to your friend: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Writing task 2
* Complete the conversation between you and your friend Michael in one to two sentences. How would you accept his invitation? How would you refuse his invitation?
¯ Michael: Can you come to my birthday?
í Refuse: ____________________________________________________________because, ____________________________________________________
í Accept:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
* Michael is inviting you to watch a movie this Monday. Answer the question using ‘might’
¯ Michael: Hey, will come with me to the cinema this Monday?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Prompt attributes:
Task 1:
* The task which prompts the student to write a letter based to a particular someone is to help him/her become more familiar and fluent in developing his day-to-day conversational skill
* This is a formal way of assessing the student’s ability to write letters or notes
* Prompts are aimed are mainly to assess and develop the student’s fluency in writing a letter or a note which is add...