What are we looking for in students’ writing?

Greetings to everyone Marking students’ writing is tedious work. Teachers duly find grammatical mistakes covering the page with corrections. Students receive their compositions feeling unhappy that after having spent a lot of time and effort the result looks unsuccessful. What should we look for in students’ writing? Many teachers would say that they want grammatical and lexical accuracy. However, there are crucial aspects of writing that outweigh accuracy, which teachers have to take into consideration. Our teacher, Helen Taranenko, admits that her observation shows those aspects are often forgotten, especially in General English classes. Today she would like to share some ideas on how to approach students’ writing.

What are we looking for in students’ writing? THE CRITERIA To assess students’ writing teachers need to apply appropriate criteria. What shall we focus on? Grammar? Lexis?

Content. Let’s imagine that you asked your students to write an email inviting a friend to a party. One email was written without any grammatical or lexical mistakes, but failed to mention the time and the place where the party would be held. The other one wasn’t that accurate, but provided all the necessary information and the mistakes didn’t impede the meaning. In a real life situation, the first email would be useless. The conclusion should be drawn that the content of the piece of writing is crucial. It has to contain the required information and those requirements are given in the task. That is the first criterion of assessment.

Communicative achievement. Is it now time to correct the errors? Wait. If that invitation-to-a friend email with all the correct grammatical structures and perfect spelling begins with “Dear Mr.Smith, You are cordially invited to join…”, it is difficult to call it successful as the friend might think it was a bad joke. The reader of the piece of writing is important, thus, the style or register that is used plays a significant role in achieving the communicative purpose of that writing piece. This criterion is very conveniently called communicative achievement.  A writing task ought to have the communicative purpose and a writer is supposed to use appropriate style and follow conventions of the communicative task- an informal or formal email, a report, an article, etc.

Organization. You probably want to ask if we finally arrived at the grammar and lexis point. Not yet. A grammatically and lexically perfect piece of writing might be very hard to read because of its bad organization. Any text needs to be coherent, well-organised and logically linked. Only in this case the reader will be able to follow a composition easily. When we mark our students’ written work, we need to look at paragraphs and logic behind constructing them, at conjunctions, linkers and discourse markers. These are the tools which make it possible to comprehend the writer’s thoughts and ideas. 

Language. Finally, the language is assessed. Of course, appropriate vocabulary and a good range of grammar structures also influence the final mark. But now we know that before starting correcting grammar mistakes, teachers have to look at three very important aspects of their students’ written work.

If you would like to read more about the development of students’ writing skills and the assessment of their writing, check the following books:

• ‘How to teach writing’ by Jeremy Harmer will give you general guidelines
• Handbook for B2 First will provide you with the information about the assessment criteria.

From Grade Education Centre