I mean the use of lyrics In teaching writing in EFL classes . Thank you

Try to make activities based on real life. Give them an example to fill blanks the verbs of a daily life routine for exaample and then they should try to make their own following the one you give them. I think that before all of this you should make a game where students can exchange what they did during the day.. or another idea is... try to understand what they would love to write and help them through a list of words and structures to write it. Don't correct too much because it can affect their motivation in some cases!

I often ask them to write some science fiction. They tend to like it and it allows me to see how they are handling different verb tenses, as well as technical or advanced vocabulary.

Dear Ghada, your question is very general and there is no best procedure...

It depends on many factors including learners' age, learners' proficiency level, the number of the test-takers, the aim of the assessment and so on.

For general questions like this, you better refer to books written on teaching or testing language skills. Any procedure has its own pros and cons, if you ask me go through writing skill of "Language assessment: principles and classroom practices" by D. Brown

There is an article in the ELTJ "there is no best method" by Prabhu. The gist of the article is that what really bothers us about teaching is when the teacher is not engaged with the class. Writing is similiar in the sense that we need to be engaged with the audience. ESL/EFL has the problematic circusmstance that what we would in the classroom really has no purpose other than samples for grading. This is the complication we all face on a daily basis. A solution or best way, I do not think exists. However, if the students feel engaged or feel there is a purpose beyond the classroom, I think the results will be more encouraging.

In higher education I feel the best is Argumentative/ Persuasive essay given within a time limit (similar to IELTS) but with some guidance on possible points. This is because it gets the students thinking of how best to put forth their opinion & ideas without being stuck with not having background knowledge of the topic. It works well with my students & it has helped in identifying strong & weak writers, their strengths & weaknesses for remedial.

The basic principle is to test what you teach. Thus, if you are teaching paraphrasing, then that is what you test. Writing activities should cover as many different genres as possible and should reflect real life situations as closely as possible.

Well, I agree with a comment above that this a too general question: there's no specific method or technique that totally fits unless the specific purpose or goal is well known. For example, what type of writing you're assessing: free writing? controlled writing? argumentative writing? expository writing?

If it's advanced writing, I usually use a RUBRIC for assessing a writing piece in the light of some pre-determined criteria/standards such as: accuracy, appropriacy, relevance, fluency, word choice.

Hope this helps!

Dr Mahmoud M. S. Abdallah (Curriculum & TESOL/TEFL)

College of Education, Assiut University, Egypt

There isn't a best approach than the one that suits the learners in questions based on their background - where they are coming from. My Turkish students because of their background do not like to write paragraphs so I devised a means of first class discussion on a specific topic, then write sentences on the board for them to arrange sequentially into a paragraph. Having taking them through series of this method, then one can introduce writing a full but short paragraph.

The goal is to give students a topic or task that makes it easy for students to write. Therefore, a task-basked assignment for all students is an effective way to evaluate not only writing, but also the students' ability to analyze and reach conclusions. For example, give students a chart of world population growth. Then give them a list of various countries and the population growth rate for each country--choose maybe 3 that have a low rate of growth (Italy, Korea) and 3 with a high rate (Somalia, Egypt). Give everyone the topic of "Using the data on population growth, write a composition on two or three reasons that explain the high rate of population growth in some countries and the low rate in others."   With the whole class thinking about the same topic, you will have many answers to the population question. Then you can teach the writing skills and grammar to go along with this kind of composition. Students will be using "because" and "because of" and "more than" and "higher than" as well as the logic and analysis that they bring to the task-based topic.  Definitely create a rubric that includes something on how sophisticated their analysis is as well as the organization of the composition.    

I think for writing skills Paragraph writing is the best so that students develop their thinking & writing skills. For this role of teacher is to facilitate the students and set the assessment criteria for the same. It may include topical sentence, content, use of correct language, coherence etc.

Evaluating writing means considering the sophistication of writing, including things like organization, grammar, and vocabulary. Fill-in-the-blank cannot accomplish that (but might have a different role, such as helping students build their vocabulary).

I like the 6 + 1 Traits model for evaluating writing.  See the attached file and:  http://educationnorthwest.org/traits/traits-rubrics

Hi!

I'm afraid that just saying 'writing skills' is not enough to answer your question. Testing involves to make use of some kind of tool (questionnaire, essay writing, etc.) to elicit the information you need in order to assess whether your students have learned what they were expected to learn in the course, unit, etc. This means that the tool cannot be decided in advance, but rather the way round: Considering the objectives of the teaching (for instance, to be able to narrate things about their daily life in past), and the contents of the teaching (the 'what' they have been taught) and the learning activities they have done in order to practise and learn, you will choose one tool or another. As a 'recipe', the tool used for eliciting what they have learned should be familiar to them, i.e. if they have written essays for practice it is fine to ask them to write another one for testing. Another 'recipe' is to make always clear the criteria you are using in your assessment, i.e. what you will consider 'good', 'bad' or 'excellent'. Finally, when trying to teach writing skills it is always sensible to remember that learning to write well, especially in a foreign language, takes a long long time (it should be set as a long-term objective) and for that reason there are assessing tools that work well, such as the portfolios that have already been mentioned in another answer to this question. I hope this helps :-)

Assessment of writing, to me, begins with the topic. The "problem-based" approach or a content-based approach can give students a real-life situation as the topic for writing. An example is llife expectancy. Students research life expectancy in two or three countries and then write about the reasons that might explain a high or low life expectancy. The rubric varies according to the topic. With this topic, the teacher would want to see grammar and vocabulary that supports a cause-effect analysis. A sentence such as this one: "Although awareness of nutrition may be a factor in life expectancy rates in Norway, in Mali, a developing country,  the awareness of the importance of good nutrition is not high among the people and this may contribute to a lower life expectancy rate as compared to Norway and other developed countries."  The grammar can be supported through worksheets and separate grammar instruction, but the grammar can be related to the writing style.  This problem-based way to introduce writing and analysis through writing works with adult learners, but may be inappropriate for children or adult learners who are refugees whose education has been disrupted to the point that they are not familiar with analysis from a 3rd person point of view and who lack the vocabulary to do problem solving compositions.   

1. You need to diffrentiate between direct testing and indirect testing. Fill in the blank, multiple choice, cloze tests, etc., are all indirect forms of assessing writing. You are better of using a direct method for the positive backwash it has on students learning to write.

2. You need to differentiate between writng as process and writing as a product. The former is much more natural and is best assessed by what Mihri suggested; portfolios. The latter is more common in accademic settings where students have a set time to complete the task.

3. A vital part of the "procedure" you ask about is having clear and consistent scoring criteria. This is done using some sort of rating scale (holistic, analytic, primary trait or multiple trait). For an EFL class I would suggest either an analytic or multiple trait rating scale for the beneficial diagnostic feedback it provides.

4. The most important question you need to ask yourself is 'what is the purpose of the writing class?' If, for example, you are preparing EFL students for a proficiancy test (IELTS or TOFEL), then you're best off treating writing as a product and testing it accordingly.

Remember the whole purpose of any test is for you to get a valid and reliable estimate of what a student can do in a certain condition.

To my experience I think the power of the instructor's prediction is important, that is you should figure the difficult areas where students make mistakes and concentrate on it. Here see a big theory in language teaching which is contrastive Linguistic Hypothesis under which you find a variety of assessment tools. You can also apply Error Analysis Hypothesis under which other types of assessment can be found{cloze test, standarized test, self-assessment tests and so on