The difference of formative writing assessment procedures Among novice and experienced teachers

The current study explores the relationship between teachers’ evaluations of foreign language (L2) writing and their years of teaching L2 writing. Thirty English teachers from a language institute in Tehran, Iran evaluated ten essays written by English learners and justified their scores for each essay with three qualitative comments. Results showed that the most experienced writing teachers gave significantly lower scores than did the less or the least experienced writing teachers for four of the ten essays. Analyses of the qualitative comments on these four essays suggest that the experienced teachers made either more negative or fewer positive comments on aspects such as general organization, language fluency, ideas and general language. In other words, though having varying experiences in teaching writing, these teacher groups might share or differ in other background variables which might have contributed to the similarities and differences in their evaluations.

Keywords:

Formative assessment (FA) , Writing Evaluation procedures , Novice , Experienced , Summative assessment (SA)