초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Many Korean English teachers usually assess learners’ writing according to their subjective judgement without using any rating scale in the writing class. The validity of assessment has been the main issue in the language testing field. This study aims to examine the validity of the assessment categories in their subjective holistic scoring of their EFL students’ English writing. For this purpose, three English teachers at various high schools participated as raters. When assessing given writing samples, they did think-aloud tasks to reveal which aspects of writing they paid attention to. It was found from this study that they focused on content, grammar and intelligibility, paragraphing, length and so on. As raters in other studies did, all of them appear to be conducive to the validity of their assessment. Meanwhile, the results show that they also sometimes considered features such as the degree of a learner’s commitment in doing the written tasks and the level of previously assessed scripts, which implies that it would be desirable that they are provided with either guidance on features for writing assessment or an appropriate rating scale which can guide which features they need to consider for the given context.
