Revisiting the Writing Assessment Process at a Saudi English Language Institute: Problems and Solutions

Abstract

Over the past several decades, writing assessment has evolved in an ever-growing attempt to provide contextual fairness to a student while maintaining standards across a larger community. This study analyzed writing assessment at a Saudi English Language Institute (ELI) by first discussing teaching and learning in an EFL context before examining the shortcomings of current Saudi methods in assessment. A universal rubric created by the Saudi ELI allows for consistency across the program and cross-grading between teachers ensures honesty in assessment, but this rigidity leads to a lack of trust between teachers and coordinators and disallows contextual-based learning. First-hand research and literature analysis show that an analytic, rather than holistic, rubric will allow greater contextual-based learning, and that elimination of cross-grading will empower a teacher to become more directly involved with each student. These changes ultimately benefit the students, teachers, and coordinators of the program.

Assessment by Thai academic English writing teachers of the flow of given to new topic information within academic writing

“…It is now possible to state that even though it was believed that allocating more grade weighting towards topic information development, maintenance, and organization, and coherence in assessing written academic discourse by Thai academic English writing teachers would be advantageous (Barkaoui, 2011;Connor & Farmer, 1990;Smit et al, 2017), the findings of this study do not indicate feasibility for such. According to the findings, the Thai academic English writing teachers were not able to significantly distinguish the progression of given to new topic information in written academic text, therefore, given to new information progression may not be a feasible source of writing quality assessment at this time (Alshakhi, 2018;Connor & Farmer, 1990;Todd, 2016).…”

“…Traditionally, evaluating the writing ability of tertiary students has always been one of the more daunting tasks taken on by English as a foreign language (EFL) writing teachers. Research has shown that writing teachers dedicate countless hours examining, judging, and allocating more grade weighting toward the substantial aspects of an EFL students' academic writing, e.g., content, grammar, organization, punctuation, spelling, style, and vocabulary (Alshakhi, 2018;Beck et al, 2018;Cohen, 1994;Downing, 2015;Veloo et al, 2018). However, not all aspects in academic written discourse are equally important (Barkaoui, 2011).…”

“…It was found that topic information elements within all rubrics accounted for less than 20%, with over half of the reviewed rubrics at 0%-10% (Vaezi & Rezaei, 2019). The second criterion that should be considered is that the academic writing analysis must consider the amount of time and energy writing teachers already expend on assessing academic writing tasks (Alshakhi, 2018;Jung et al, 2019;Paltridge, 2021). Ultimately, the examination must be relatively brief and efficient without additional time or sacrificing reliability and should retain evaluative quality by accurately measuring the EFL students' writing ability (Cook et al, 2021;Schneider & Connor, 1990).…”

A Theoretical Review on the Need to Use Standardized Oral Assessment Rubrics for ESL Learners in Saudi Arabia

“…Similarly, Aldukhayel (2017) explored the clarity and familiarity of three scoring rubrics that were used to assess students' writing achievement in the preparatory year program (PYP) in a Saudi university. Another study by Alshakhi (2019) aimed at exploring the weaknesses of the Saudi writing assessment methods employed at an English Language Institute. The results showed that replacing the existing holistic rubric with an analytic one can enhance contextual-based learning and eliminate cross-grading, to improve student-teacher relationship.…”

The Impact of Negotiation as a Social Practice on EFL Writing Peer Assessment Sessions

“…In addition to those issues, raters are often concerned about the scales of exemplary texts, how those scales are constructed, and what linguistics aspects should be included in them (Hamp-Lyons, 1990; Knoch, 2011;Alshakhi, 2019). In the Saudi context, writing assessment has hardly ever been a subject of agreement amongst practitioners, instructors, or even students for many years (Obeid, 2017;Alshakhi, 2018). Its complexity represents a challenge for many writing teachers.…”