English Language Evaluation

Evaluation of language performance is mostly relevant to (1) language learners and the language they produce and (2) language raters who judge how exact and suitable that language product to be. Scoring language production either written or spoken involves a lot of side issues. Brown (2004) believes that the more open- ended a task or production is, the more difficult the scoring procedure will be. Writing in a foreign language which relies on vocabulary, semantic, and grammar, is to a large extent open to a variety of judgment and evaluation (Moss, 1994). In other words, essay writing assessment involves multifaceted skills and evaluation criteria and necessarily includes subjective judgment. This fact clarifies the importance of the

Statement of the Problem and Purpose of the Study Writing assessment can be done both objectively and subjectively. Objective assessment is an indirect approach which focuses on separate subskills in writing and is used to test beginners. However, it is not possible to infer the examinees' writing ability by using indirect assessment. Examinee's writing performance requires language production and direct tasks which are mainly open- ended controlled ones. In these tasks, examinees produce texts on a given topic (Weir, 2005). According to Leung and Lewkowicz (2006), scoring of these tasks is subjective and needs raters' judgments. By the use of rating scales, judgments can be done objectively. In scoring written performance, using rating scales, raters' decision- making has the important role and it is affected by the raters' assumptions, expectations, preferred rhetorical models, world knowledge, biases, and notions of correctness (Cohen, 1994). As Alderson, Clapham, and Wall (1995) stated, to ensure consistency in judgment, rater training is necessary. During rater training, raters get familiar with the test construct, the tasks, the scale, and the way of making

Scoring: Scoring is procedures for giving numerical values or scores to the responses in a test (Richards & Schmidt, 2010).

1.5.4. Scoring rubric: Scoring rubrics are a set of scoring guidelines or criteria used in scoring or judging a test takers product, performance or response to a constructed-response item type of assessment task (e.g. writing an essay in L2) to make raters subjective judgments more reliable (Richards & Schmidt, 2010).

1.5.6. Writing Tasks: In this study, two writing tasks of TOEFL- iBT test, one independent and one integrated writing task will be used.

1.5.7. Independent writing task: For independent writing task, test takers are presented with a question which will ask test takers' opinion on an issue. Regardless of the question, test takers will be expected to use specific reasons and examples to support their answers.

1.5.8. Integrated writing task: In integrated writing task, test takers are first required to read a short article and after that listen to a lecture on the same topic, and then write in response to what they have read and heard. To begin with, test takers' focus should be on summarizing the main points of the lecture. The next step is to show how the lecture challenges or supports the