Teaching and Evaluating Writing as a Communicative Skill

The writing tasks that we have our students carry out are often nothing more than academic exercises that have little or no communicative content or purpose. It is incumbent upon us to integrate writing as a communicative act into our present use of writing as a support skill for ensuring student preparation of “traditional” homework assignments and for the purpose of evaluation on paper‐and‐pencil tests. This article presents (1) the purposes of writing in a second‐language classroom, (2) types of writing tasks, (3) proficiency levels in writing, (4) content of writing activities, (5) sample writing activities, (6) evaluating writing samples using both holistic and analytical scoring techniques, and (7) a sample evaluation of student writing.