2003 Articles

Scoring Procedures for Assessing Writing

Park, Taejoon

The evaluation of writing ability of L2 students has become increasingly important in recent years, because the results of such evaluations are used for a variety of administrative, instructional, and research purposes. One of the first decisions to be made in determining a system for directly assessing writing quality is what type of scoring procedure will be used: Should a single score be given to each text, or should the different features of a text be scored separately? This issue has been the subject of a great deal of research and discussion in the composition literature. Among others, two types of scoring procedures have mainly been discussed: analytic and holistic scoring.