Writing Assessment under the Competency Based Approach Paper submitted for the first national conference: Current Trends in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning- flexibility- Creativity and Innovation

Abstract

For over a half century writing has been a central topic in applied linguistics and remains an area of lively intellectual research and debate; interest in the writing skill and its improvement led to successive approaches to teaching writing. This is strongly linked to the different approaches to teaching English as a foreign language which were on their parts influenced by psychological trends such as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism. As the role of writing increases in language learning, classroom assessment practices of writing also become increasingly important. Consequently, the question of how to assess or evaluate students‟ written productions motivated researchers and educators to research in this area in order to suggest, each time, approaches for assessing writing also related to language teaching theories and writing instruction. Before presenting the main approaches to assessing writing, we are going to define some confusing terms related to the topic