Assessing Business English writing: The development and validation of a proficiency scale

Despite the profusion of language proficiency scales being implemented worldwide, few attempts have been made to develop such instruments of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Situated in the context of English language education at the tertiary level in China, this paper reports a study to develop and validate a writing proficiency scale of Business English (BE) to facilitate the teaching, learning, and assessment of BE writing in Chinese universities. Employing a multi-phase mixed-methods design, this study set out to determine the descriptive categories of the BE writing scale drawing on the model of Genre Knowledge (Tardy, 2009). Workshops were then organized in which 15 experienced teachers of BE writing examined the descriptive categories as well as a pool of descriptors profiling BE writing proficiency in order to determine their relevance to BE education in China's tertiary context. Next, a questionnaire was administered to elicit views from university students (n = 572) about the difficulty of the descriptors. The Rasch measurement model was utilized to calibrate students' difficulty ratings. Finally, one-on-one interviews were conducted to elicit teaching and domain experts' perceptions of the scale. The findings of this study shed light on the complexity and intricacies of ESP proficiency scale development.