Towards an instrument for the assessment of the development of writing skills

An important aspect of academic foreign language writing courses is assessing and grading the quality of students' writing products. This can be done by using holistic or analytical scales or by ranking. What is needed specifically for the Dutch context is an instrument geared towards the specific objectives and context of our foreign language courses, which can help the teacher to assess students' written products with more validity and which can be used to assess students' progress over time. A joint project, aiming at developing such an instrument for the specific Dutch context, has recently started at the departments of English and Spanish in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The present article describes the first step towards developing the above-mentioned instrument: the set-up of two modest-sized "longitudinal" learner corpora, one for Spanish and one for English. These corpora will contain learner essays written under controlled conditions and on predefined topics. The first batch of student essays was collected in March 2002. Lexical and syntactic analyses of these essays will provide a unique insight into the development of the students' writing skills. An initial quantitative analysis of the essays has already yielded a number of interesting observations. The article concludes with a tentative suggestion for a more elaborate instrument to relate student performance to teacher assessment.