Writing assessment in higher education: Making the framework work

The importance of appropriate assessment methods for academic writing skills in higher education has received increasing attention in SLA research in recent years. Despite this, there is still relatively little understanding of how academic writing skills develop at the most advanced levels of proficiency. Use of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is one way to ensure the comparability of findings across research efforts and continue to move the field forward. This paper presents some key concepts and definitions from the fields of SLA and advancedness research, language assessment and corpus linguistics and introduces several papers that address writing assessment within the context of higher education. © 2013 John Benjamins Publishing Company

A comparative analysis of CEF level classification methods in a written learner corpus

In this study, various proficiency classification methods are explored in order to describe the relevant levels on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) that are represented by a group of 127 incoming English students at a Dutch university with respect to academic writing. The weakness of the widely-used group-based institutional status approach is demonstrated with two distinct student-centered approaches, self-assessment and test scores, both of which highlight the within-groups variation that is hidden in group-based approaches. Between-texts variation is further explored through the comparison of self-assessment and text-centered approaches to classification such as test item (response) scores, and widely used measures of lexical variation and syntactic complexity. Findings demonstrate the potential variation in the understanding of academic writing development depending on the the methods of proficiency classification used. © 2013 John Benjamins Publishing Company