A Developmental Cooperative Assessment Model Of ESL Writing Class

The issue of arriving at an effective means of measuring students' learning has been a major concern to not only teachers, but also students themselves and even teaching administrators, given the complex nature of learning process, the educational and political context, as well as the widespread and growing use of portfolios and web-based instructions in higher education. Taking into consideration the new trend in web-based writing assessment and the current characteristics of non-English-major postgraduates, this paper introduces both affect test and self-assessment into the traditional assessment scheme of non-English major post-graduates ESL writing classes and proposes an improved assessment model, namely, the developmental cooperative assessment model. In addition, the newly proposed model has undertaken the practical testing for two semesters in the writing classes of non-English-majorpostgraduates in Dalian University of Technology (DUT) Learning results after the actualapplication of a whole semester are analyzed and compared to see whether such addition can improve or encourage ESL learner's writing performance. Participants are also interviewed to reflect on their attitude towards such addition.Results show that both affect test and self-assessment are welcomed by the majority of learners and play a relatively positive role in the whole ESL writing process. As reported by participants, affect test can promote and facilitate the English learning process by stimulating learners to think more deeply about their learning states and make favorable adjustments accordingly. Self-assessment, similarly, offers learners an opportunity to examine their own writing and feel the progress by themselves. The comparison of writing scores suggests that self-assessment is more of help in self-revising than in timed-essay writing while affect test leads learners to make more progress in the final writing.