DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

Paraphrasing

The initial step in teaching paraphrasing is to ensure that learners understand the importance of paraphrasing: to say something in ones own words, to avoid plagiarizing, to offer some variety in expression. With those possible motivations and purposes in mind, the test designer needs to elicit a paraphrase of a sentence or paragraph, usually not more.

Guided Question and Answer

Another lower-order task in this type of writing, which has the pedagogical benefit of guiding a learner without dictating the form of the output, is a guided question-and-answer form at in which the test administrator poses a series of questions that essentially serve as an outline of the emergent written text. In the writing of a narrative that the teacher has already covered in a class discussion, the following kind* of questions might be posed to stimulate a sequence of sentences.

Guided Questions

1. Where did this story take place? (setting)

2. Who were the people in the story? [characters]

3. What happened first? And then? And then? [sequence of events!

4. Why did__________________do__________________? (reasons, causes]

5. What did__________________think about__________________?

7. [opinion]

8. What happened at the end? [climax]

9. What is the moral of this story? [evaluation]

Paragraph Construction Tasks

The participation of reading performance is inevitable in writing effective paragraphs. To a great extent, writing is the art of emulating what one reads. You read an effective paragraph; you analyze the ingredients of its success; you emulate it. Assessment of paragraph development takes on a number of different forms:

1.        Topic sentence writing.

Assessment there of consists of

·                      # specifying the writing of a topic sentence,

·                     #scoring points for its presence or absence, and

·                     #scoring and/or commenting on its effectiveness in stating the topic.

2. Topic development within a paragraph.

Because paragraphs are intended to provide a reader with "clusters" of meaningful, connected thoughts or ideas, another stage of assessment is development of an idea within a paragraph. Four criteria are commonly applied to assess the quality of a paragraph:

·                  #the clarity of expression of ideas

·                  #the logic of the sequence and connections

·                  # the cohesiveness or unity of the paragraph

·                 #the overall effectiveness or impact of the paragraph as a whole.

3. Development of main and supporting ideas across paragraphs.

As writers string two or more paragraphs to gether in a longer text (and as we move up the continuum from responsive to extensive writing), the writer attempts to articulate a thesis or main idea with clearly stated supporting ideas. These elements can be considered in evaluating a multi-paragraph essay:

·                  addressing the topic, main idea, or principal purpose

·                -addressing the topic, main idea, or principal purpose 

·                -organizing and developing supporting ideas

·                -using appropriate details to undergird supporting ideas

·                -showing facility and fluency in the use of language

·                 -demonstrating syntactic variety.

 

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