This article reports on the development of a self-rating instrument for writing. The instrument engages learners in responding to a writing task and assessing their own proficiency against a set of benchmarks. The technical and conceptual framework for the instrument is the DIALANG project, a diagnostic language assessment system for 14 languages on the internet. The report comprises a description of the self-rating procedure, an account of instrument development, a report on a usability study with six learners of Finnish as a second language, and our test-developer analysis of the process and products of the self-rating instrument. The data consists of records of task and benchmark development, participant background data, the texts that the learners wrote, video recordings of their screen actions during the self-rating process, immediate retrospective interviews with the learners, and teacher ratings of the learner texts. The discussion concentrates on the concepts that underlie the self-rating process and the potential offered by this approach for the learning, teaching, and assessment of second language writing.
There is relatively little research on how well the CEFR and similar holistic scales work when they are used to rate L2 texts. Using both multifaceted Rasch analyses and qualitative data from rater comments and interviews, the ratings obtained by using a CEFR-based writing scale and the Finnish National Core Curriculum scale for L2 writing were examined to validate the rating process used in the study of the linguistic basis of the CEFR in L2 Finnish and English. More specifically, we explored the quality of the ratings and the rating scales across different tasks and across the two languages. The relationship of task peformance across the scales and languages was also examined. The kinds of analyses reported here are relevant to other SLA studies that use rating scales in their data gathering process.
The article examines student teachers' pedagogical language knowledge. The analysis is based on data from an applied task in which Finnish student teachers (n D 221) of 16 school subjects assessed second language (SL) learners' writing skills. First, we briefly discuss subject teachers' role in language and literacy teaching in the multilingual and multicultural classroom. Our findings indicate that the student teachers use a range of criteria but focus mainly on word-level assessment when assessing writing samples, and that their assessment orientation varies from technical to analytical. Finally, we discuss the challenges of developing teacher education to promote pedagogical language knowledge across the curriculum.
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