What do teachers and students expect in assessing writing?

Talking about writing is difficult for me to think of a way of assessment different to correct grammatical structures, punctuation and connection between the ideas in a passage written by the student. Well, that was the first idea I had before I read the chapter. But, what is the goal of assessing writing? I would have to say that it depends on what you want to evaluate and this just can be known once the purposes and objectives of the assessment are established concretely.

Assessing writing is a production skill which requires all the knowledge we have of our foreign or even native language to perform correctly. It is noticeable that students don't like much writing and this reluctancy increases the problems to improve this skill. In my opinion, the importance of motivation and  the creation of dynamic activities to increase writing practice will give forceful results. Of course, we as teachers will have the task to achieve this change of perspective in our students.

Once the students are motivated they will expect to write correctly in order to express their ideas. Here, this chapter is really useful, because the aspiration of professors and students is to write perfectly. So, what the students expect is to receive detailed feedback in their compositions and learn specific strategies to improve their written style.

We need to be aware of the role we are playing in our students learning process. The importance of establishing precise goal in writing assessment will influence how significant and effective is our teaching and more important, the student's process.

Assessing Speaking

Assessing speaking requires to consider several elements of the process of learning. Not only pronunciation, but also grammar, vocabulary and of course listening are aspects that take part of the speaking performance of a student. The last mentioned (listening) is directly related to speaking, according to Brown, " No speaking task is capable of isolating the single skill of oral production. Concurrent involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possible reading, is usually necessary". This means that, oral performance is supported by aural performance. 

Another aspect that is necessary when we assess speaking is the specification of criteria. Once we design a task is important to consider that test-takers can provide an infinite number of options to a question. For this, the objectives of the assessment need to be clear and easy to guarantee dependable evaluations.

The last relevant aspect in assessment speaking is related to the effectiveness of the scoring the procedures, which should be reliable. In order to accomplish this, Brown states, " Because of the above two characteristics of oral production assessment, it is important to carefully specify scoring procedures for a response so that ultimately you achieve as high a reliability index as possible".