Review of Assessing Writing

As its title suggests, Assessing Writing (AW) is a forum for academic discussion of the theory and practice of writing assessment. It addresses an international, English speaking audience of writing specialists, including teachers and researchers. It is not interactive. The journal's emphasis on quantitative and mixed methodologies reflects the influence of its publisher, Elsevier, a 129-year-old Dutch publishing house specializing in scientific, technical, and medical information. Online institutional access to the journal is available through ScienceDirect; individuals may subscribe to the journal for $56 US. Rated a category B journal by the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), AW is published three times each year. My review of AW is based on its 2008 issues, which are dominated by four concerns: high-stakes testing, the value and limits of empirical evaluation, the role of technology in assessment, and L2 learners' experiences with assessment.

AW's definition of its own scope and focus is remarkably broad, even for a niche as apparently finite as assessment. According to Elsevier's website:

The journal focuses on all stages of the writing assessment process, including needs evaluation, assessment creation, implementation, and validation, and test development; it aims to value all perspectives on writing assessment as process, product and politics …The scope of the journal is wide, and embraces all work in the field at all age levels, in large-scale (international, national and state) as well as classroom, educational and non-educational institutional contexts, writing and programme evaluation, writing and critical literacy, and the role of technology in the assessment of writing.

In some ways, the journal lives up to this definition. Its articles examine writing assessments from various perspectives: Liz Hamp-Lyons's editorial at the beginning of issue 13.1 discusses educators' experience via a discussion of the disparity between contributors' consensus that a "technological, humanistic, political, and ethical" generation of assessment has arrived and the lived reality of educators at the National Council on Measurement and Statistics (NCMS) who work under pressure from No Child Left Behind (2); Lee Hee-Kyung's contribution to 13.2 examines students' perceived familiarity with prompts; and Anthony Petruzzi's highly theoretical article in 13.3 speaks to researchers, interrogating the persistence of the "neo-empiricist" dream of a methodology that will yield "consistent, reliable, and universal" (221) meaning and suggesting a shift toward a view of the humanities more in keeping with Heideggerian hermeneutics. Because it speaks to many different audiences about both practical and theoretical concerns, AW facilitates meaningful dialogue throughout the field of assessment.

AW also fulfills its promise to address institutions of various size and the ever-increasing role of technology in writing assessment. A comparison of Ling He and Ling Shi's contribution to 13.2 with Atushi Iida's article in 13.3 illustrates the diversity in the sizes of institutions that contributors study. He and Shi's "ESL students' perceptions and experiences of the standardized English writing tests" explores 16 Chinese and Taiwanese students' experiences with the TOEFL Test of Written English (TWE) and the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index (LPI) in a Canadian university; it analyzes assessment by Educational Testing Services (ETS), a multinational non-profit organization. Iida's "Poetry writing as expressive pedagogy in an EFL context: Identifying possible assessment tools for haiku poetry in EFL freshman college writing" outlines a method for assessing expressive writing in a much smaller context: the college classroom. Examples of AW's commitment to exploring the role of technology in writing assessment include "Electronic scoring of essays: Does topic matter?" in which Cindy L. James investigates the relative impact of prompt content on male and female and L1 and L2 respondents, and "Keyboarding compared with handwriting on a high-stakes writing assessment: Student choice of composing medium, raters' perceptions, and test quality," in which Carl Whithaus, Scott B. Harrison, and Jeb Midyette conclude that high-stakes testing environments should offer respondents the opportunity to choose a composing medium. AW's 2008 issues expose readers to the challenges faced by teachers, researchers, and other assessment professionals in large and small institutions; they focus particularly on challenges involving technology and standardized tests.

However, a lack of material addressing readers and writers outside secondary and post-secondary educational contexts tempers the journal's success. None of the issues of AW that I read include any discussion of non-educational institutional contexts. The articles studied college students almost exclusively, which means that they address few learners under the age of sixteen or over the age of forty. Replacing the journal's stated concern with institutional and age diversity is a pronounced, perhaps purposefully unstated emphasis on ESL readers and writers. This emphasis may be an effort to appeal to an international audience, but it may also represent an implied statement about the ubiquity of the multilingual classroom: serving L2 (and L3 and L4) readers and writers is the heart of language pedagogy and assessment, not a secondary concern.

Works Cited

Elsevier. 2009. 15 Feb. 2009 <http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/homepage.cws_home>.

Hamp-Lyons, Liz, ed. Assessing Writing: An International Journal. 13.1 (2008).

Hamp-Lyons, Liz, ed. Assessing Writing: An International Journal. 13.2 (2008).

Hamp-Lyons, Liz, ed. Assessing Writing: An International Journal. 13.3 (2008).