APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
EVALUATION
Assessing productive skills (writing and speaking)
The most common task types for testing written performance
According to the extent of controlling test takers’ freedom of expression in their written work three kinds of writing tasks can be distinguished: controlled, guided and free or creative writing tasks. The more controlled the tasks are the easier it is to ensure reliability, but they become less valid measures of writing ability.
Controlled writing tasks impose complete control over both language and content. They cannot be considered real writing tasks in the sense, that the writers do not produce any/or very limited writing of their own. Controlled writing tasks are: multiple-choice sentence completion, transformation, (these are tests of usage testing grammar at sentence level), cloze/modified cloze, translation, editing/error correction/proof-reading.
Guided writing tasks give a full task environment by specifying several features such as
- the content/topic/information to be included in the written text (what),
- the role of the reader, the relationship of reader to writer (to whom)
- the role of the writer him/herself or in an assumed role (who)
- the reason for writing, the effect the writer wants too achieve (explanation, request etc)(why)
- text type, style (informal/formal), genre (how)
- details of date to be used/date of background events (when)
- details of place, background, context, situation (where)
In this way the test taker can get enough information so that s/he can treat the task as a social writing activity, as a real-life activity. Guided writing tasks can be considered authentic tasks as by giving a full task environment they simulate a real-world writing task. This is the way how we write in the real world. The most common writing tasks are: form filling, writing a summary of texts (it is a typical academic writing task), writing from given context or a fully defined situation, responding to an input text (e.g. incoming letter), information transfer from non-verbal input (e.g. describe pictures, diagrams, maps, flowcharts), agreeing or disagreeing with a given statement.
Free composition writing imposes little linguistic control on the writer. In free writing tasks there is minimum control, only the composition titles are given and the test takers are free to express their ideas in their own words.
