How to Assess Interpersonal & Presentational Writing in Your World Language Class
It makes sense that if we ask our students engage in informal writing tasks, then we should also assess these two modalities in our French, Spanish, and Italian World Language classes. I have heard some language teachers assert the notion that we should not assess writing—especially at the novice levels—but I believe that we are doing our students a disservice if we never measure their writing proficiency and growth over time…even, and perhaps most especially, in our level 1 courses.
In this blog post, you will learn tips and strategies for assessing your students’ writing proficiency fairly and accurately; you will glean ideas for streamlining the assessment process so that you spend less time assessing and grading; and finally, I will share some simple yet effective writing rubrics that you can use to highlight your students’ strengths as well as weaknesses, and speed up the grading process so that you can devote more time to other teaching tasks.
Why even assess writing?
Writing is one of the four communication modes we expect students to improve during the school year and throughout their language-learning journeys. When we assign writing assessments to students, we convey in no uncertain times that writing is a critical skill that we expect them to improve over time. The students of today’s generation tend to focus on what will move the needle forward in terms of their grades, so if we never assess their writing progress, they are likely to receive the false impression writing is an unimportant, secondary skill that they don’t need to pay much attention to.
Some students may feel that with the advent of online language translation tools and AI, they won’t realistically ever need to know how to write in the target language, but I argue that writing is a key to improving overall proficiency: writing forces students to use language holistically, creatively, and spontaneously. Why wouldn’t we want our students to engage with language in such an incredible way?
It’s no secret that most middle and high school students don’t love writing in the target language: it’s challenging, cognitively and linguistically demanding, and it makes students uncomfortable. Let’s face it: wanting to express an idea but not being able to do so effortlessly like they can in their L1 is uncomfortable, but just like most other skills, the more they practice, the better students will get.
How to Assess Writing
When developing writing assessments for your students, I think it’s important to keep the following points in mind:
Create interesting and engaging prompts. Think about prompts that are most likely to interest your students. Ideally, they should relate to the thematic unit you have most recently studied and reflect what students can realistically do with language at this level.
Give students multiple prompts to choose from. If you only give one prompt, you risk not inspiring all of your students; however, by giving them multiple prompts to choose from, you are increasing the likelihood that they will be able to select a writing prompt that sparks their creativity.
Consider giving students a heads-up about the chosen prompt(s). While I don’t explicitly tell students what the prompts will be, I make sure that I give them some idea of what they will be writing about so that they can brainstorm and prepare in advance.
Choose a point of view. Are students writing in first-person or third-person? Both are valuable, so consider alternating between the two throughout the year.
When administering writing assessments in class, consider these points:
Avoid technology. Simply put, students have access to too many tools on the Internet, so any writing assessment done on the computer is guaranteed to not truly reflect students’ writing proficiency. Instead, opt for traditional paper and pencil.
Give students ample time to write. Some students can write in the target language without much difficulty, but others require significant time to think and process in the target language.
Review important writing conventions before students begin. Talk about whichever writing conventions you will be looking at most closely: introductory paragraph, body paragraphs, spelling, grammar, verb conjugations, concluding paragraph, etc. This will set students up for success and ultimately save you time grading.
When assessing student writing, I’d like you to think about the following points:
Don’t correct every mistake. Focus on the most salient errors that students have made. If you correct every mistake, you risk overwhelming your students… nobody wants to receive a paper covered in red ink. (Also, it’s incredibly time-consuming to meticulously hunt for and point out every single error.) Instead, try to focus on errors that students should no longer be making at their current level, as well as errors that will greatly improve comprehensibility.
Pro Tip: Don’t fix their mistakes. Just circle them. Students need to be able to fix their own mistakes, so when reviewing student writing, you want to point out that something they have written is incorrect and then ultimately have them correct their own work.
Highlight their strengths. What have your students done well? Students are interested in areas of improvement, sure, but they also want to know where they excelled. Try to find at least one or two areas where they met or exceeded your expectations.
Give yourself a time limit. Grading student papers can be incredibly time-consuming, so you must set a time limit before you begin. How much time can you realistically dedicate to each paper? If you have 125 papers to grade, can you spend 10 minutes per paper? Most likely not. I try to spend 2 minutes per paper: 1 minute reading and circling errors, and 1 minute filling out the rubric. Speaking of rubrics…
Save Time and Assess Fairly & Accurately with Writing Rubrics
I love writing rubrics because they allow me to pinpoint my students’ strengths and areas in which they can improve. It is so important for writing rubrics to be simple yet accurate.
Go for simplicity. Students tend to understand simple rubrics better than more complicated ones. We also want rubrics that are simple because they save us time. If you, like me, have 150 students a year, spending 5-10 minutes per rubric is unfeasible. We don’t need to leave students three paragraphs worth of comments because, let’s face it: they want to know their grades, and they want a general understanding of where they excelled and what areas they need to work on. Keep your rubrics simple for both your sake and your students.
Prioritize accuracy. We want our rubrics to fairly and equitably assess student proficiency. There is an inherent level of subjectivity and bias associated with writing assessments, but a high-quality rubric can help minimize this so that you ensure that your students are being assessed fairly.
It is for these two reasons that you absolutely need to consider taking a look at my World Language Writing Rubrics. This resource contains SIX different rubrics with TWO different scoring methods for each, adding up to a total of TWELVE unique, versatile rubrics to choose from. All of the rubrics are FULLY EDITABLE, so that you can customize them to suit your needs best as well as those of your students. Lastly, this resource includes an Editing/Proofreading Checklist that you can distribute to your students either before or after a writing assessment.
Intrigued and want to learn more? Click on any of the thumbnails
below to take a closer look at my World Language Writing Rubrics.
I also have a FREE WRITING RUBRIC in my Free Resource Library (click here!). Feel free to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter to access it!
Practical Tips for Implementing Writing Assessments
Be sure to embed plenty of writing activities and tasks in your instruction. If students do not have informal opportunities to practice writing in your class, writing assessments will be incredibly challenging. Similarly, give students opportunities to self-correct, peer correct, and receive teacher feedback on their writing.
Be mindful of the hyper-anxious students. For some students, a writing assessment could be the most stressful thing you have them do in your class. Be sure to work with students, their parents, guidance counselors, and even administration to ensure your writing assessment is developmentally appropriate for these anxious students.
Consider alternating between writing and speaking assessments. You do not need to assess writing every week, every month, or even every marking period/semester. You can alternate your assessments so that students can target their writing and speaking proficiency. It also gives them (and you!) some much-needed variety, as well.
Collaborate with team teachers and departmental colleagues. We all have the task of assessing writing, but it can be really wonderful to bounce ideas off of your colleagues or to plan and co-create assessments with your team language teacher. Don’t feel like you need to bear the burden of writing assessments on your own—use the resources available to help streamline the experience!
I hope this post has helped you consider the importance of assessing writing proficiency and that you are walking away with a few more tools to assess your students fairly, accurately, and efficiently. You can assess your students’ writing proficiency formatively throughout the marking period/semester or at the end of a thematic unit as a summative assessment. Using the rubrics that I linked above will for sure save you time and energy in the grading process, which is what we want as World Language teachers in order to ensure our students are receiving the feedback they deserve but that we are not burning ourselves out in the process.
Do you assess interpersonal and/or presentational writing proficiency? If so, what works best for you in your World Language classroom? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below! I’d love to hear all about it.
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
