The validation process of an analytical scale for the assessment of EFL writing in higher education.

Villa María

Congreso; V Jornadas Nacionales de ELT: Innovations and challenges in the 21st century; 2019

Intituto Académico Pedagógico de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de Villa María

Assessment and evaluation are essential components of the learning process, as they determine the necessary accreditation for students to participate actively and properly in the educational community. Due to this, the impact of evaluation is a problem that continues to be explored, since it is a reality that teachers and researchers should analyse and reflect on in a systematic way. In fact, in many cases, assessment and evaluation processes have a bearing on concrete pedagogical practices. The assessment of foreign language writing in particular is a very complex field of study, which tends to cause apprehension and anxiety among teachers because of its consequences and implications at all levels ?pedagogical, ethical and political (Crusan, 2010; Lee, 2017). In 2014, our research team started to study the assessment of academic writing in the context of the English Language II course at Facultad de Lenguas, UNC, focusing first on teachers? assessment practices and beliefs, and then on the design of two instruments to assess academic writing: an analytic scoring scale and a holistic scale. Even though writing scales have been used for a long time, their application in the context of the above-mentioned course is totally new. In this presentation, we will briefly describe our new research project, scheduled for 2018-2021, which aims at validating an analytic scoring scale through the analysis of the descriptors of each band of the scale. In this particular case, we will make reference to some of the main difficulties we have had in the process of searching for appropriate exemplar scripts so far. This validation procedure, which is in itself innovative mainly in terms of the methodology applied and the context in which it will be carried out, will enable us to reach higher reliability levels. Our ultimate purpose is unifying criteria among raters in order to guarantee the reliability of the instrument used to assess such an important component of the evaluation process in the aforementioned course.