Reflections Upon The Writing Activities In The Third Secondary Year (3ème As) Elt Textbook New Prospects

Abstract

Assessment covers all sorts of activities that teachers engage in to evaluate their pupils’ progress and learning needs. Though it is an integral component of teaching in today's globalized world, it is regrettable that many programmes in EFL teaching do not require assessment courses. Thus, several teachers enter the classroom without a thorough grounding in assessment issues. Yet, courses on teaching written expression often devote a limited amount of time to the discussion of assessment. Therefore, it is too complex to choose rating scales and delineate criteria for valid and reliable essay evaluation. In accordance with this thinking, the central focus of this inquiry is to gain a deeper understanding of how to determine an effective and formal method of assessing writing ability, as well as to gain insights of an appropriate rating scale to serve in the teaching-learning assessment process in the writing classroom. On account of this, a case study involving 38 third-year (Bab El Assa High School) pupils was carried out as an attempt to investigate the pedagogical tools for improving our pupils’ writing ability through an effective assessing system. Three main factors have contributed to the choice of the above-mentioned population mainly timing (4 hours per week), high coefficient attributed to English, and teaching the same population for two consecutive years. In fact, the participants have been assigned to three research instruments (triangulation) so as to bolster the credibility and validity of the research specifically a students’ questionnaire, a progressive experimental test based on pupils’ writing samples and focus group observations. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been used to prove the unreliability of the holistic rating and the efficiency of the analytic scoring. Specifically, the study’s problematic statement endeavours the evaluation of 3rd year Literature and Philosophy pupils’ writing skill as qualified to be vague and weak. Overall, the present study calls for improving an analytic scoring scheme capable of assessing pieces of writing as effective and as objective as possible to meet future challenges.