4 How to assess your students' skills in writing in English

Like speaking, writing in English is not just about producing grammatically accurate sentences. Writing a text involves a number of skills, and students may have spent some time writing drafts and reviewing their own and each other’s’ work.

Activity 4: Assessing written English

Think about your students and classroom as you answer the following question. If you can, share your ideas with a colleague.

Imagine that your students have written a text in English, such as a report about a school event. Imagine that you have collected your students’ work and that you are now assessing it. What will you give marks for?

When you assess written English – especially longer texts such as reports, compositions, letters and so on – you can consider the following questions:

  • Is the text appropriate? (For example, has the student written a report about a local school event, or has the student described the school in general?)
  • Is the text clear and easy to understand? Is it organised and sequenced logically?
  • Is there a wide range of vocabulary? Are words repeated often?
  • Are there any spelling or grammar mistakes, or mistakes with punctuation?
  • Is the style appropriate for the reader? (For example, a report about an event should be factual, and it should also be interesting to read.)
  • What’s good about the text? What is interesting about it? Has the writer thought about the reader of the text?

Note the final point in the list above: it is important to say what is good about a piece of work. This encourages students, and helps them to see what the purpose of writing is – not a vehicle for memorising and copying texts, but for expressing ideas and conveying a message to a reader.

Now read a case study about a teacher who has just assessed some written work of his Class X students, and see how he uses questions like the ones above to grade his students’ work, and to give feedback to individuals.

Case Study 3: Mr Sampath assesses some written work from Class X

First Flight, NCERT’s Class X textbook. The chapter features an extract from Anne Frank’s diary. At the end of the chapter is a writing exercise, detailed below.

Now you know what a diary is and how to keep one. Can you keep a diary for a week recording the events that occur? You may share your diary with your class, if you wish to. Use the following hints to write your diary.

  • Though your diary is very private, write as if you are writing for someone else.
  • Present your thoughts in a convincing manner.
  • Use words that convey your feelings, and words that ‘paint pictures’ for the reader.
  • Be brief.

For this activity, I told students to write 50–100 words each day over the following week at home, and to bring in their completed diary after a week. Before they began writing, we discussed some ideas of what they could write about, and each day, I reminded them that they should be writing.

After one week, I put students into groups of four or five. I told them: ‘Choose one interesting diary entry and share it with the group.’ I allowed them ten minutes.

I then asked ten students to give me their diaries. I would like to look at each student’s diary but that’s difficult for me – I have 47 students, and there is a writing exercise in every other chapter of the textbook. I just haven’t got the time to read and grade 47 pieces of written work that often! So what I do is take in work from ten different students each time so that I get to see written work from every student.

I then read through the ten diaries, and gave them feedback using questions, covering these areas:

  1. Is this written as a diary?
  2. Is it clear and easy to understand?
  3. Is there a wide range of vocabulary?
  4. Are there mistakes with grammar, spelling and punctuation?
  5. What’s good about the diary entries?

I wrote comments in each area and then gave a grade out of ten for each question to make a total of 50. The feedback is much more important for the students to help improve their learning, but the grade was easy for me to record and quickly copy into my notebook. Here is the feedback I gave to one student:

  1. This is clearly written as a diary. You have clearly marked each day of the week, and have written about things that happened each day, and have conveyed your feelings. You have written between 50–100 words each day. Well done. (10/10)
  2. The diary is mostly clear and easy to read, but I don’t understand exactly what happened on Tuesday. Can you make this clearer? (7/10)
  3. You have used quite a good range of vocabulary, and you have used some different words to convey your feelings. You could have used more words for ‘happy’ – for example,‘glad’, ‘pleased’ or‘delighted’. Try to work on developing your vocabulary. (6/10)
  4. There are a number of mistakes with the grammar, spelling and punctuation. Look at the corrections I have made and review the correct spellings. You should also review the rules for forming the past simple tense. Ask me if you have any questions. (5/10)
  5. You have tried hard to make this interesting for the reader by writing about some interesting events and describing how you felt. I enjoyed your diary entry for Thursday. What a funny story! (9/10)

Overall grade: 37/50 (Good, but keep working on your vocabulary, grammar and spelling.)

When I read through and graded the ten diaries, I noticed that most of the students had problems in using the past simple and present perfect tenses correctly. I then decided that I would review these tenses using some of the examples from the diaries in the following class. It’s clear that this class needs more practice in writing about their experiences.

This activity worked well and students liked having questions to guide their work and my feedback. This helped them know what to focus on. Since it is difficult for me to provide feedback to each student, the next time I do this I might try having the students assess each other’s work and give each other feedback.

Activity 5: Try in the classroom - assessing your students' writing skills

In Case Study 3, Mr Sampath assessed the written work that his students did as part of their regular classroom teaching. He assessed diary entries, but you can use the same techniques to assess any kind of writing activity:

  1. Find the next writing exercise in your textbook. Alternatively, you could create a writing activity such as some paragraphs about a topic in the textbook, a letter, a report, a story, or a diary, like the teacher did in Case Study 3.
  2. Write the questions you will use for assessment on chart paper or on the blackboard, so your students know what you will be grading and what is important to think about when writing. Discuss the questions so that students are aware of what they need to do to get a good mark. You could give them some examples. You can use these questions to begin with:
    • a.Is the text appropriate? For instance, if you asked the student to write a story, have they written one? Or have they written a different kind of text, such as a report?
    • b.Is the text clear and easy to understand? Is it organised and sequenced logically?
    • c.Is there a wide range of vocabulary? Are words repeated often?
    • d.Are there any spelling or grammar mistakes, or mistakes with punctuation?
    • e.Is the style appropriate for the reader?
    • f.What’s good about the text? What is interesting about it? Has the writer thought about the reader of the text?
  3. When students have finished, take in their work. If you have a large class, take in the work of a group of your students. If you do this, make sure that you choose different students each time. You could also ask students to assess each other’s work using the grid.
  4. When you grade their work, try to include comments for each student in easy-to-understand terms that they can use for improvement.
  5. Record the grades in your notebook.
  6. What has the assessment told you about your students’ learning? Are there areas you need to review again?

Pause for thought

Here are some questions for you to think about after trying this activity. If possible, discuss these questions with a colleague.

  • Did the questions help you to grade your students’ work?
  • If not, how could you change them to make them more useful?
  • Did students find the feedback easy to follow and use for improvement?
  • Could your students assess each other’s work using the questions?

You may find that the questions suggested in this activity are not completely appropriate for your students and the writing task. You can experiment with and change the questions, perhaps omitting some and adding others. Discuss appropriate questions with your colleagues if you can, or with your students.

Make sure that the questions are clear to your students and that the feedback that you give them based on the questions is simple and easy to follow. You can check this by giving them an opportunity to implement changes based on the feedback, and by checking these changes.

These questions can also be useful for students to review or assess their own work, or to use to assess each other’s written work. Therefore, it may not always be necessary for you to check and grade your students’ work, as they can check their own and each other’s. (For more information on this, see also the unit Whole-class writing routines.)

3 How to assess your students’ skills in speaking English

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