As part of a larger case study, this single exploratory case study aims to explore the potential of genre-based pedagogy (GBP) to allow L2 writing instructors to enact their writing assessment literacy and feedback literacy. The findings demonstrate that GBP afforded the participating writing instructor of a genre-based EAP writing course to carry out effective writing classroom assessment practices and thus enact their2 writing assessment literacy and feedback literacy. GBP allowed effective writing classroom assessment practices such as diagnostic assessment and learner involvement in assessment. More specifically, genre exploration tasks led to diagnostic assessment and helped the instructor coordinate effective classroom discussions to elicit evidence of the students’ knowledge of the target genre that they would study. Second, students’ production of texts in target genres not only allowed the instructor to collect evidence of the students’ specific genre knowledge, but it also afforded learner involvement through self-reflection. The instructor could also efficiently interpret this evidence and provide formative feedback through pre-established genre specific assessment criteria.

This paper introduces the Persuasive Essays for Rating, Selecting, and Understanding Argumentative and Discourse Elements (PERSUADE) corpus.The PERSUADE corpus is large-scale corpus of writing with annotated discourse elements. The goal of the corpus is to spur the development of new, open-source scoring algorithms that identify discourse elements in argumentative writing to open new avenues for the development of automatic writing evaluation systems that focus more specifically on the semantic and organizational elements of student writing.

Scoring is a fundamental step in the assessment of writing performance. The choice of the scoring procedure as well as the adoption of a discrepancy resolution method can impact the psychometric properties of the scores and therefore the final pass/fail decision. In a comprehensive framework which considers scoring as part of the validation process of the scores, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of rater mean, parity and tertium quid procedures on score properties. Using data from a writing assessment task applied in a professional context, the paper analyses score reliability, dependability, unidimensionality and decision accuracy on two sets of data; complete data and subsample of discrepant data. The results show better performance of the tertium quid procedure in terms of reliability indicators but a lower quality in defining construct unidimensionality.

Written assessment feedback in higher education has been examined from different perspectives. However, there is limited empirical evidence of how tutors use language to provide assessment feedback on students’ assessed academic writing. By deploying the rarely used Appraisal framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this innovative study examined the use of evaluative language by tutors in feedback on undergraduate business students’ academic writing in two assignments at a distance university. The data consisted of 16 tutor assessment feedback summaries on eight students’ written assignments and interviews with those students. The Appraisal system of Attitude (Judgement, Appreciation and Affect) was used to analyse the evaluative language of the summaries. The analysis of student interviews provided insights into their perceptions of tutor feedback, complementing the linguistic analysis. The findings suggest that tutors’ evaluative language was primarily used to judge students rather than to appreciate the assignment, and show their emotional reactions, potentially owing to the distance learning context. Additionally, while most of the feedback was perceived positively, students found certain types of tutor feedback less helpful. The paper has implications for moving assessment feedback research forward through applying the Appraisal framework, improving assessment strategies and tutor formative feedback practices in writing assessment.

Students are usually expected to write full texts in English as a foreign language (EFL) at the end of secondary education. However, research on EFL writing at school is scarce, especially regarding less proficient writers, and seldom focuses on deep-level text features such as structure and coherence. Based on a sample of 166 EFL students in Year 9 attending German middle and lower performance track schools, this study examined 326 narrative and argumentative texts. First, we assessed structure and coherence via analytic ratings using detailed rubrics to gain insights into possible challenges for students. Our analysis showed that relevant text parts (such as the conclusion) were mostly missing and that students struggled to establish a broad common thread with argumentative texts being overall less structured and coherent than narrative texts. Second, we used the software Comproved® to conduct holistic ratings of overall text quality and compared them with our analytic ratings. Large correlations between both ratings suggest that structure and coherence are important aspects of text quality. We discuss how our rubrics can serve as a useful tool for assessment for learning and assist less proficient writers in establishing deep-level features in their texts.

Integrated tasks are increasing in popularity, either replacing or complementing writing-only independent tasks in writing assessments. This shift has generated many research interests to investigate the underlying construct and features of integrated writing (IW) performances. However, due to the complexity of the IW construct, there are conflicting findings about whether and the extent to which various language skills and IW text features correlate to IW scores. To understand the construct of IW, we conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize correlation coefficients between scores of IW performances and (1) other language skills and (2) text quality features of IW. We also examined factors that may moderate the correlation of IW scores with these two groups of correlates. Consequently, (1) reading and writing skills showed stronger correlations than listening to IW scores; and (2) text length had a strongest correlation, followed by source integration, organization and syntactic complexity, with a smallest correlation of lexical complexity. Several IW task features affected the magnitude of correlations. The results supported the view that IW is an independent construct, albeit related, from other language skills and IW task features may affect the construct of IW.