The Assessment of L2 Written English across the MENA Region

This edited book brings together contributions from different educational contexts across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in order to explore how L2 English writing is assessed. Across seven MENA countries, the book covers aspects of practice including: task design and curriculum alignment, test (re)development, rubric design, the subjective decision making that underpins assessing students' writing and feedback provision, learner performance and how research methods help shed light on initiatives to improve student writing. In such coverage, chapter authors provide concrete evidence of how assessment practice is governed by their unique context, yet also influenced by international standards, trends and resources. This book will be of interest to second language teachers, assessors and programme developers as well as test designers and evaluators.

Provides a synthesis of assessment practices currently taking place across the MENA region Establishes similarities and differences between countries in their administration, development and use of writing assessments Showcases research and practice from under-represented educational settings

Autorentext

Lee McCallum is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. She has extensive teaching and assessment experience from the Middle East, Europe and China. Her most recent work is a co-authored book entitled Understanding Development and Proficiency in Writing: Quantitative Corpus Linguistics Approaches (forthcoming, 2021). Christine Coombe is an Associate Professor of General Studies at Dubai Men's College, United Arab Emirates. Christine is co-editor of multiple projects, including The Cambridge Guide to Research in Language Teaching and Learning (2015). Her forthcoming books are on research questions in language education and professionalism.

Inhalt
Part I: Test Design and Administration: Connections to Curriculum and Teacher Understandings of Assessment.- Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Language assessment literacy.- Chapter 3: Creational Reverse Engineering: A Project to Enhance English Placement Test Security, Validity, and Reliability.- Chapter 4: Re-building the Tower of Babel? Promises and Problems of World Englishes for Writing Assessment.- Part II: Grading and Feedback Connections: Exploring Grading Criteria, Practices and the Provision of Feedback.- Chapter 5: CAF profiles of Iranian writers: What we Learn from them and their Limitations.- Chapter 6: Exploring the Essay Rating Judgements of English Instructors in the Middle East.- Chapter 7: How Writing Teachers' Beliefs Influence Grading Practices.- Chapter 8: Designing Scoring Rubrics for Different Writing Tasks: The Case of Resume Writing in Iran.- Chapter 9: Evaluating English for Professional Purposes: Primary Trait Rubric.- Part III: Teaching and Assessment Connections: Exploring Learner Performance and the Impact of Instruction.- Chapter 10: Assessing L2 Argumentation in the UAE Context.- Chapter 11: Integrated Summarizing Read-To-Write Task: Patterns of Textual Borrowing and the Role of the Written Genre.- Chapter 12: Changing Practices to Overcome Writing Difficulties in EFL Courses at the Tertiary Level: A Lebanese Case Study.- Chapter 13: Integrating Computer and Teacher Provided Feedback in an EFL Academic Writing Context.- Chapter 14: Feedback Research in the MENA Region: State of the Art.- Part IV: Using Research Methods to Capture the Nature of Writing Proficiency and its Assessment.- Chapter 15: Spelling Errors in the Preliminary English B1 Exam: Corpus-informed Evaluation of Examination Criteria for MENA Contexts.- Chapter 16: Learning What Works in Improving Writing: A Meta-Analysis of Technology-Oriented Studies across Saudi Universities.