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Having a certain degree of assessment literacy is crucial for today's language teachers. The main aim of this paper is to provide that knowledge as it pertains to the writing skill. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the main practical issues that teachers often face when evaluating the written work of their students. It will consider issues and solutions in five major areas: test design; test administration; ways to assess writing; feedback to students; and the effects on pedagogy.

The author took a very practical and principled approach to the complete process of assessing the written work of our students in a foreign or second language.

The cyclical relationship between teaching and assessment can be made entirely positive provided that the assessment is based on sound principles and procedures. Both teaching and assessment should relate to the learners' goals and very frequently to institutional goals.

Good teachers spend a lot of time ensuring that their writing assessment practices are valid and reliable. The author deals with the fundamental issues that underlie good test design in a very practical and understandable way and later suggests practical steps to ensure smooth and reliable test administration before dealing with ways to assess a range of different writing tasks. Then, the crucial issue of how best to provide useful developmental feedback to students is considered. She concludes by discussing how best testing practice should seek to accommodate the requirements of test takers.

This topic is significant as assessing foreign/second language writing skills is one of the most problematic areas in language testing. It is made even more important because good writing ability is very much sought after by higher education institutions and employers.

Many students with learning disabilities (LD) experience significant difficulties in developing writing proficiency. Early identification and intervention can prevent long-term writing problems. Early identification and intervention require reliable and valid writing assessments that can be used to identify students at risk and monitor their progress in response to intervention. One promising approach to assessing students' performance and progress in writing is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). In this chapter, we provide an overview of CBM. Next, we describe a theoretical framework for writing development, and discuss implications of this framework for developing writing assessments. We then describe current efforts to develop a seamless and flexible approach to monitoring student progress in writing in the early elementary grades, and highlight important directions for future research. We end with a discussion of how teachers might eventually use CBM to make data-based decisions to provide effective individualized interventions for students who experience writing difficulties.

This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction.

This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers’ dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students’ writing. An expanded version of Rainey’s (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used.

The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practices may be attributed to institutional characteristics of the teachers’ contexts.

This study illustrates how the concept of prolepsis can be productively used as a lens through which to understand teachers’ instructional choices.

The descriptive findings show how individualized coaching of students’ writing about literature can also support literary reading. Teachers of English need not worry that they have to choose between teaching writing and teaching reading.

This study presents dialogic assessment as a useful way to guide students through the writing process and literary interpretation simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between high-stakes testing, disciplinary knowledge and teachers’ pedagogy in English. The most prevalent standardized assessment form in the current Australian context is the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) undertaken each year by students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in all Australian States and Territories. Understood in the context of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011, pp. 100-101) – the NAPLAN tests serve as a bi-partisan governmental response to a perceived need to improve the quality of teachers and schools in Australia.

The authors draw on the key sociological constructs of Pierre Bourdieu (1995) to analyze the ways in which the writing component of the suite of NAPLAN tests serves to legitimize and idealize particular kinds of writing, writers and teachers of writing.

The authors suggest that in the absence of current literacy policy and curriculum instability, this national test shapes the literacy field, influencing the direction of writing practices and pedagogy, and, therefore, subject English itself, in Australian classrooms.

This assessment intervention is considered in the context of the history of writing, and addresses accordingly fundamental questions concerning the changing nature of the writing/writerly field, the impact of assessment on teachers’ conceptions of disciplinarity and pedagogical content knowledge and students’ experiences of writing and thinking in subject English.

To investigate sixth-grade students with learning disabilities and their use of Google Docs to facilitate peer revision for informational writing.

A qualitative case study is used to examine how students used Google Docs to support peer revision. Constant comparative analysis with a separate deductive revision and overall writing quality analysis was used.

The findings indicate that students used key features in Google Docs to foster collaboration during revision, they made improvements in overall writing quality, their revisions focused on adding informational elements to support organization of their writing and revisions were mostly made at the sentence level, and students were engaged while using the technology.

We postulate that the use of peer revision coupled with Google Docs technology can be a powerful tool for improving student writing quality and for changing the role of the writing teacher during revision. The use of peer revision should be accompanied with strong explicit instruction using the gradual release of responsibility model so that peer tutors are well-trained. Writing teachers can use Google Docs to monitor and assess writing and peer collaboration and then use this knowledge to guide whole and small-group instruction or individual conferences.

This paper aims to investigate elementary students’ writing experiences using a digital writing application and compares the results to the findings and recommendations of a national survey on instructional practices in writing.

Mixed methods were used to assess the quantity and quality of P-5 public school students’ writing over time. Teacher, librarian and student perceptions and experiences were examined and compared to the results and recommendations from a national survey on writing.

This paper provides empirical insights into the use of a digital writing application in writing instruction. Findings showed the use of a digital writing application: significantly increased the quantity and improved the quality of student writing; excited and motivated students to write; extended the learning day so more time was spent on writing; and supported students of special populations. Comparison to the recommendations of the national survey showed five of seven recommendations were not met in this study.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to conduct further investigations.

The paper includes implications for writing instruction using digital applications for teachers, librarians and educators in pre-service teacher and school librarian preparation programs.

Considering limited growth in national writing scores and the transition to online writing assessments by 2019, this paper addresses the need to integrate technology into writing instruction and offers practical strategies for doing so.

Over the last twenty years, many studies have examined the impact of structured writing programs on improving accounting students’ writing skills. In this chapter, we extend this research by using writing assignments that are representative of the workplace writing experiences that students encounter in their professional careers, by developing an evaluation instrument to assess the effectiveness of structured writing programs, and by using business advisory board members to evaluate improvement in students’ writing. Our results suggest that our new approach to designing writing assignments representative of workplace writing helps students improve their writing skills. Our business advisory board members’ ratings indicate that the overall quality of the students’ writing improved over two semesters of completing a series of workplace writing assignments. Specifically, our structured writing program improved students’ business writing skills in the areas of organization (paragraph unity, layout, and conclusion) and style and tone (conciseness and word choice). Students also improved in their ability to explain technical aspects of accounting work and in certain aspects of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The results and tools provided in this study should assist other programs in either implementing or improving a structured writing program.

This paper asserts that while educational resources are times effective in teaching students how to write, the format in which they are delivered can influence results. With this in mind, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of using educational resources in a blended format.

This study used a mixed-method research design to elicit information from 70 participants recruited for this study. The researcher divided the participants into experimental and control groups where the researcher taught the control group writing skills in a hybrid learning environment without using educational resources while the experimental group used blended interactive educational resources. The researcher analyzed and interpreted the participants’ post-test scores and transcripts of the interviewees.

This study finds that blended interactive educational resources contribute significantly toward improving the students' writing skills; however, improvements were not found in all aspects of their writing.

This study unpacks the positive contributions of blended interactive educational resources in writing instruction. This study contributes to educational literature in showing that these resources may be effective in improving some aspects of writing text. This study adds to other corpora of studies that emphasize the importance of using educational resources for learning.

In spite of the growing interest in using corpora in language teaching and learning, applying computers and software (especially corpora software) is still new in second language teaching and learning. In addition, employing a learner corpus-based perspective in teaching metadiscourse features in International English Language Testing System (IELTS) writing tasks is not reported to the best knowledge of the researchers. Understanding and spotting this gap, the purpose of this paper is to utilize a learner corpus-based approach in teaching metadiscourse features and investigate its possible impacts on IELTS writing performance of the Iranian second language learners. Therefore, this study addressed the following research questions and hypotheses.

The current research utilized a quasi-experimental research design. In addition, this research used a learner corpus-based methodology. The corpus-based methodology was exploited to enable the researchers to have access to a large body of authentic language materials. In other words, a corpus-based methodology was used due to the fact that it made it possible for the researchers to elicit the metadiscourse features from a large number of authentic writing materials and to employ them during the treatment process with authentic examples.

The findings showed that there was a positive correlation between teaching metadiscourse features and writing performance of IELTS learners; in that, teaching metadiscourse features could soar the writing performance of the subjects. In addition, interactional metadiscourse features had more impact than interactive metadiscourse features on writing performance.

The results of this research can have useful implications for second language teachers and learners as well as researchers in learner corpus as they can learn the creation and application of learner corpora in second language teaching and learning.

This paper is value in that it uses corpus software and methodology in teaching metadiscourse features in writing section of IELTS test.

Struggling writers and students with disabilities tend to have difficulties with multiple aspects of the writing process. Therefore, in this chapter, we describe Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008). SRSD is a writing intervention with extensive research demonstrating its effectiveness for improving the writing quality of struggling writers and students with disabilities when implemented by both teachers and researchers in a variety of educational settings. We also describe an ineffective writing practice, stand-alone grammar instruction. Although this type of grammar instruction is explicit, it is removed from an authentic writing context, and decades of research have demonstrated its negative effects on students’ writing quality. We close the chapter with recommendations for future research on SRSD as well as general suggestions for teachers who provide writing instruction to struggling writers and students with disabilities.