An Overview

Large numbers of international students come to the United States to study in American universities. The majority of these students are intelligent, hard-working, and very well educated. Typically, they do well on standardized tests. Most will have scored over 600 on the TOEFL. On the whole, they were excellent students in their home countries. However, they may find the concept of classroom participation in an American setting difficult. Frequently, they discover that the reading assignments they need to do have little relation to what they have experienced as "reading" in their home country's English classes. Most significantly, they very often seem to have genuine difficulty producing acceptable academic writing in English.

International students may have difficulty writing academic English for many reasons: relative inexperience writing in any language, differing cultural values and face systems, the amount of language distance between their language and English, insufficient training in the accepted form of written academic discourse at American universities, and/or a lack of awareness of what is considered "general knowledge" by either the American public or particular academic communities. TESL-560, Second Language Writing Assessment is a one-credit course for learning about the writing dilemmas that many international students face, while at the same time allowing TESOL students to gain practice assessing student writing.

Consequently, writing assessment will be the core activity of the Second Language Writing Assessment course. The writing samples will be provided by group members. Each meeting, participants will be given a writing sample (or group of samples) to read, assess, and comment on before the next meeting. We learn to be good writing evaluators by sharing our reactions to writing with others.

Typcially, our first writing assessment activity is to read a group of writing samples and categorize them according to the TWE (Test of Written English) holistic scoring rubrics. In the following meeting, we compare results, particularly for samples where there was much variation in ratings, and we discuss our ratings to achieve consensus.

In addition to discussing our evaluations of writing samples at each meeting, we also have a discussion topic. The topic is related to what constitutes good academic writing (by American university standards) or why it is difficult for international students to organize their writing appropriately. Topics will include issues like plagiarism, reasons for choosing deductive or inductive organization, the features of good introductions and conclusions, the convention of audience in academic writing, and creating appropriate patterns of assertion/support.

Soon many of the text resources and student writing samples from the Second Language Writing Assessment course will be added to this page for your use and reference.