Assessing the Writing Skills of Entry-Level Undergraduate Business Students to Enhance their Writing Development during Tertiary Studies

Background

Similarly to other Australian universities, undergraduate students enter Curtin with a variety of minimum English language entry criteria including a pass (50%) in TEE¹ English, an IELTS² score of 6.0, a TOEFL³ score of 550 and a B or C in the CUTE⁴ test, as well as other measures. We were particularly interested to design an assessment task, purely for diagnostic purposes, that would provide a description of the writing competence of first year students. A number of existing scales and tests were examined, including the following: the ASLPR (Ingram & Wylie, 1984, now ISLPR, Ingram & Wylie, 1997; the

IELTS scales (http://www.ielts.org/format.htm); the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001); and the Curtin University Test of English (CUTE). However, we decided to develop our own scale, firstly, because the existing scales were sometimes too narrow and vague (for example, simply indicating whether student were or were not likely to cope with the demands of a tertiary course) and, secondly, because they did not offer a suitable description (for our purposes) of what students are actually able to do in writing. Much of the literature about rating scales warns of all sorts of limitations in their use (Brindley, 1996; Alderson, 1991; Bachman, 1990). However, we took the view that, as North (1993) indicates, they can be primarily practical tools for people to use for a variety of purposes, and as such represent operational, rather than theoretical models.

Developments in second language testing indicate that: language performance has come to be seen as the essential component in assessing language proficiency; that proficiency is task-oriented; that proficiency carries with it the notion of ability or skill, degrees of which should be able to be measured; and that since different sub-skills are required to carry out certain tasks, proficiency can be thought of as the mobilization of these sub-skills (Brindley, 1996). We were keen to assess students' writing ability for a tertiary context and felt that we needed to set a writing task that would reflect this but would not rely too much (since it is implemented in the first or second week of semester) on students' content knowledge of their first-year units. We therefore came up with the list of topics described below.

¹TEE – Tertiary Entrance Examination, Western Australia

² IELTS – International English Language Testing System

³TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language

⁴CUTE – Curtin University Test of English

مواضيع ذات صلة

Further considerations for the student experience

The student experience Discussion

Comments from a student with a mark lower than expected

Comments from another student who agreed with the mark

Comments from a student who agreed with the mark

Comments from a student whose marks were above expectation

Comments from a student whose marks were as expected

The student experience Comments from a student whose marks were below expectation

Is feedback valuable?

Is feedback used in other assignments?

Is any attention paid to the markers comments on essays?

Are markers comments read?