Exploring Scoring Methods In Assessing Different Types Of Writing Tasks

For quite a long time our writing sub-tests have not seen much improvement in assessing students' actual writing performance. Probably there are many reasons accounting for this, but a fundamental one can be tracked down to the writing sub-test itself.In China essay-writing has been the only subjective task in the College English Test Band 4 (CET4) and the most important subjective question type in College English Test Band 6 (CET6) for a long time, both taking up 15 percent of the total score. However, CET test designers have more and more sensed the negative effects resulting from CET. And The College English Testing Committee has been exploring new test types and more effective scoring methods, but hasn't made any significant breakthrough till now. In this paper, I attempt to explore scoring methods in essay marking and have designed a test on the hypothesis that different scoring methods may cause a validity difference in difference writing types.In this dissertation, I first reviewed the history of writing tests as well as the innate characteristics of essay writings, and then by fully considering the situations of Chinese students, I recommend two writing tasks of different types. After that I expounded at length on the features of the tasks, test rubrics and constitution of the marking scale, which aimed to prove that the writing tasks in this study were a combination of traditional and communicative style.Writing as an output language competence can provide an objective assessment on candidates' language proficiency and their logicality. Nonetheless, the subjectivity of scoring may weaken the reliability of writing sub-tests. So the validity of a writing sub-test is mostly decided by its reliability. To find a type of scientific and reliable writing sub-test, I referred to the update holistic scoring method of IELTS as well as the scoring method in the National Matriculation Examination Syllabus for English, and designed four sets of scoring methods respectively for the two writing tasks, basing them on Bachman's communicative language competence. Subsequently, an experiment was conducted by carrying out a questionnaire survey, organizing students to finishing the two writing tasks and inviting four experienced scorers to mark the papers, which was...