MARTÍNEZ JULIA INÉS
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
The Validation Process of an Analytical Scale for the Assessment of EFL Writing in Higher Education
Reunión:
Jornada; V Jornadas Nacionales de ELT: ?Innovations and Challenges in the 21st Century?; 2019
Institución organizadora:
Universidad Nacional de Villa María
Resumen:
Assessment and evaluation are essential components of the learningprocess, as they determine the necessary accreditation for students toparticipate actively and properly in the educational community. Due to this, theimpact of evaluation is a problem that continues to be explored, since it is areality that teachers and researchers should analyse and reflect on in asystematic way. In fact, in many cases, assessment and evaluation processeshave a bearing on concrete pedagogical practices. The assessment of foreignlanguage writing in particular is a very complex field of study, which tends tocause apprehension and anxiety among teachers because of its consequences andimplications at all levels ?pedagogical, ethical and political (Crusan, 2010;Lee, 2017). In 2014, our research team started to study the assessment of academicwriting in the context of the EnglishLanguage II course at Facultad de Lenguas, UNC, focusing first on teachers?assessment practices and beliefs, and then on the design of two instruments toassess academic writing: an analytic scoring scale and a holistic scale. Eventhough writing scales have been used for a long time, their application in thecontext of the above-mentioned course is totally new. In this presentation, wewill briefly describe our new research project, scheduled for 2018-2021, whichaims at validating an analytic scoring scale through the analysis of thedescriptors of each band of the scale. In this particularcase, we will make reference to some of the main difficulties we have had inthe 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 thecontext in which it will be carried out, will enable us to reach higherreliability levels. Our ultimate purpose is unifying criteria among raters inorder to guarantee the reliability of the instrument used to assess such animportant component of the evaluation process in the aforementioned course.
