Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 170

Assessment specialists have focused on designing tasks that reflect real‐world writing more accurately while maintaining rigorous standards for scoring. It has long been recognized that a single timed impromptu essay is inadequate for assessing writing (see, for example, Behizadeh, 2014). The trend in large‐scale writing tests is toward multiple tasks and new genres. For example, the TOEFL iBT® includes both an independent task and an integrated writing task that is based on listening and reading (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008), while the Cambridge suite of exams has introduced e‐mail tasks in some tests (Shaw & Weir, 2007). These less traditional tasks are bound to stimulate new validity research as they become more widely used.

At the same time the introduction of more tasks and the need to maintain rigorous standards in scoring add to the human and financial costs of producing and scoring writing assessments. AES systems are an important way to help contain such costs; thus, the ongoing debate about the use of automated scoring is another important issue that is certain to be a focus of debate in the foreseeable future.

The importance of writing in the business world and the growth of instant global communication may also mean that new assessments for business writing will need to be developed that are specifically tailored to the genres and tasks of international business communities. This is an additional area of potential growth in writing assessment (see Katz, Haras, & Blaszczynski, 2010, for an overview of the role of writing in business). Similarly, globalization and the extensive use of different varieties of English make it imperative for language testing to grapple with issues of World Englishes in writing assessment (Brown, 2014).

This entry has demonstrated the complexity of assessing writing as well as the opportunities that have emerged in an age of globalized electronic communication.

SEE ALSO: Assessment in the Classroom; Assessment of Integrated Skills; English for Academic Purposes; Rating Scales and Rubrics in Language Assessment; Task‐Based Language Assessment; Uses of Language Assessments; Washback in Language Assessment; Writing and Language for Specific Purposes