DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTENSIVE WRITING

A good deal of writing at this level is display writing as opposed to real writing: students produce language to display their competence in grammar, vocabulary, or sentence formation, and not necessarily to convey meaning for an authentic purpose. The traditional grammar/vocabulary test has plenty of display writing in it, since the response mode demonstrates only the test-taker's ability to combine or use words correctly. No new information is passed on from one person to the other.

A form of controlled writing related to dictation is a dicto-comp. Here, a paragraph is read at normal speed, usually two or three times; then the teacher asks students to rewrite the paragraph from the best of their recollection. In one of several variations of the dicto-comp technique, the teacher, after reading the passage, distributes a handout with keywords from the paragraph, in sequence, as cues for the students. In either case, the dicto-comp is genuinely classified as an intensive, if not a responsive, writing task. Test-takers must internalize the content of the passage, remember a few phrases and lexical items as key words, then recreate the story in their own words.

·      Grammatical Transformation Tasks

1. Change the tenses in a paragraph.

2. Change full forms of verbs to reduced forms (contractions).

3. Change statements to yes/no or wh-questions.

4. Change questions into statements.

5. Combine two sentences into one using a relative pronoun.

6. Change direct speech to indirect speech.

7. Change from active to passive voice.

·      Picture-Cued Tasks

1.    Short sentences.

A drawing of some simple action is shown; the test-taker writes a brief sentence.

2. Picture description.

A somewhat more complex picture may be presented showing, say, a person reading on a couch, a cat under at able, books and pencils on the table, chairs around the table, a lamp next to the couch, and a picture on the wall over the couch. Test-takers are asked to describe the picture using four of the following prepositions: on, over, under, next to, around. As long as the prepositions are used appropriately, the criterion is considered to be met.

3. Picture sequence description.

A sequence of three to six pictures depicting a story line can provide a suitable stimulus for written production. The pictures must be simple and unambiguous because an open-ended task at the selective level would give test-takers too many options. If writing the correct grammatical form of a verb is the only criterion, then some test items might include the simple form of the verb below the picture. The time sequence in the following task is intended to give writers some cues.

·      Ordering Tasks

One task at the sentence level may appeal to those who are fond of word games and puzzles: ordering (or reordering) a scrambled set of words into a correct sentence. Here is the way the item format appears.