Abstract:
In assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. This study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt-ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, two groups of intermediate EFL learners, after being homogenized, were divided into two experimental groups. In treatment phase, groups A’s compositions were scored holistically while group B’s composi-tions were scored analytically using Paulus’s scoring rubric as the benchmark. The result of Paired t-tests revealed that both scoring methods caused statistically significant differences between pre- and post-test in both groups. However, the result of the independent samples t-test in post-test between the two exper-imental groups showed that whether the writings of both groups were scored analytically or holistically, the group, which received analytic scoring during the treatment outperformed the group, which received holistic scoring. This study could have pedagogical implications in that it could encourage writing teach-ers to take the findings into account to improve the quality of writing as the Cinderella skill in a foreign language instruction and avoid sweeping the writing assignments under the practicality carpet.
Machine summary:
This study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among Iranian EFL learners.
Keywords : Assessment, Analytic scoring, Composition, Holistic scoring, Writing skill INTRODUCTION With so much emphasis on writing in foreign language classes, it seems justifiable to make an effort to investigate the effectiveness of different methods for teaching this skill and different approaches to measure students' progress towards mastering it.
078 The results of the independent t-test showed that there was a statistically significant difference in writing scores between the two experimental groups A and B scored analytically, t (39) = 4.
The results also agree with (Bitchener, Young, & Cameron, 2005); (Chandler, 2003) and (Liu, 2008) who have shown that teacher feedback on students’ grammatical and le ical errors results in a significant improvement in both accuracy and fluency in subsequent writing of the same type over the same semester, disproving (Truscott, 2004) claim on the negative effect of error cor- rection on fluency.
This is what we can see in reality in most if not all of the writing classes where on the ground of practicality, teachers resort to holistic scoring rather than analytic one despite being aware of its advantages such as increasing teach- ers’ uniformity in giving feedback and objective fairness in the evaluation process (Johnson & Hamp-Lyons, 1995).