Full Description
This edited book brings together contributions from different educational contexts across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in order to explore how L2 English writing is assessed. Across seven MENA countries, the book covers aspects of practice including: task design and curriculum alignment, test (re)development, rubric design, the subjective decision making that underpins assessing students' writing and feedback provision, learner performance and how research methods help shed light on initiatives to improve student writing. In such coverage, chapter authors provide concrete evidence of how assessment practice is governed by their unique context, yet also influenced by international standards, trends and resources. This book will be of interest to second language teachers, assessors and programme developers as well as test designers and evaluators.
Contents
Part I: Test Design and Administration: Connections to Curriculum and Teacher Understandings of Assessment.- Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Language assessment literacy.- Chapter 3: Creational Reverse Engineering: A Project to Enhance English Placement Test Security, Validity, and Reliability.- Chapter 4: Re-building the Tower of Babel? Promises and Problems of World Englishes for Writing Assessment.- Part II: Grading and Feedback Connections: Exploring Grading Criteria, Practices and the Provision of Feedback.- Chapter 5: CAF profiles of Iranian writers: What we Learn from them and their Limitations.- Chapter 6: Exploring the Essay Rating Judgements of English Instructors in the Middle East.- Chapter 7: How Writing Teachers' Beliefs Influence Grading Practices.- Chapter 8: Designing Scoring Rubrics for Different Writing Tasks: The Case of Resume Writing in Iran.- Chapter 9: Evaluating English for Professional Purposes: Primary Trait Rubric.- Part III: Teaching and Assessment Connections: Exploring Learner Performance and the Impact of Instruction.- Chapter 10: Assessing L2 Argumentation in the UAE Context.- Chapter 11: Integrated Summarizing Read-To-Write Task: Patterns of Textual Borrowing and the Role of the Written Genre.- Chapter 12: Changing Practices to Overcome Writing Difficulties in EFL Courses at the Tertiary Level: A Lebanese Case Study.- Chapter 13: Integrating Computer and Teacher Provided Feedback in an EFL Academic Writing Context.- Chapter 14: Feedback Research in the MENA Region: State of the Art.- Part IV: Using Research Methods to Capture the Nature of Writing Proficiency and its Assessment.- Chapter 15: Spelling Errors in the Preliminary English B1 Exam: Corpus-informed Evaluation of Examination Criteria for MENA Contexts.- Chapter 16: Learning What Works in Improving Writing: A Meta-Analysis of Technology-Oriented Studies across Saudi Universities.
