Teach English in Fangcheng Zhen - Linyi Shi

As English teaching teachers, there are many pressing issues concerning the criteria of assessment while we grade our students’ writings. This reflection is aimed to investigate how standardized testing has robbed students of first, their ideas, then, their ‘voice.’ Finally, encouragements and implications are suggested at the end. Writing is a constructivist process, in which writers make meaning of the world through their own experiences. Good writings, therefore, should reflect the writers’ thoughts and personality in some ways (Hillocks, 2005, cited in Brimi, 2012.) While this holds true for many ‘good’ writings produced by many ‘good’ writers, when it comes to teaching English language learners, it is not so. Evidently, due to standardized testing, students are asked to pay attention to the written products more than their process of writing (Hillocks, 2002, cited in Brimi, 2012.) Since teachers are guiding students to usually write a formulaic five-paragraph essay, in which ‘objective criteria’ such as grammar and spellings accuracy, the use of transitions, and other easy-to-measure elements are prioritized, ideas and creativity are often neglected (Brimi, 2012.)This is even more vexing when grading or marking ‘kills’ students’ voices in their creative writings, where ideas and opinions make them unique. This phenomenon of preferring the ‘style over substance’ in writing assessment has been going on in multiple settings due to its nature of ease in scoring (O’Connor, 2012.)This is especially true in a collectivist classroom in which authorial voice and creativity are not valued as much as perfect accuracy in formatting. The situation, however, tended to improve since the communicative approach emerged in language teaching. As both students and professionals acknowledged that it is unfair to judge writings by appearance, content is now occupying the majority of writing assessment’s criteria. Although ‘content’ is now the key concept in various writing textbooks, learning standards, and writing rubrics, ‘voice’ still remains a construct that is loosely defined in the literature and elusively assessed in practice (Zhao, 2013.) On the concept of ‘voice,’ Kesler (2012) quoted Bakhtin (1986) that it is a ‘dialogic overtones,’ in which thoughts are ‘born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thoughts.’ With this, he believed that the concept should enable teachers to provide opportunities for students to ‘find’ and ‘express’ their ‘identities’ by harnessing the power of the audience and sociocultural context. He was also concerned, like many of us, that ‘authorial voice’ or ‘authorial identity’ is still somewhat lacking in writing instruction and assessment. As a result of this, it should be highly reinforced in the modern classroom and in all kinds of writings, creative or not. So, how then do we teach students to put ‘voice’ in their writings and how can we assess them? Kesler (2012) has given five practical tips for teaching writing with ‘voice.’ I found this very beneficial and practical in terms of getting students to take ownership of their own writings. First, teachers need to establish a ‘writer community,’ in which ‘students grow into and acquire the concepts, habits, and dispositions of writers in interacting with one another.’ Activities such as conferences, self-peers response, and writing workshop should be held regularly within a class to achieve this. Secondly, students should be provided with guiding questions that stir their intention of writing (e.g. what is your purpose for writing?) and their expected genre (e.g. what form or genre will suit the purpose of your writing?) Students, then, should be provided with mentor texts. As teachers, it is imperative to immerse students in the language of the discourse in which they strive to write, thus, ‘anchored’ texts enriched with strong ‘voice’ of the writers is a must. Next, students need to be able to share their work with the public and this should go beyond the class, but the larger community in their settings. They should be also taught to express comments on each other writings because, in order to make sense of one’s identity, others’ identity needed to be taken into consideration. With today’s technology available for usage, perhaps teachers can use social web media such as Facebook, Fan fiction sites, and blogs as creative grounds for student writers. Last but not least is teachers must use a generous reading to assess students’ writing. Spencer (2010 cited in Kesler, 2012) proposed that in order to grade students’ voices, raters need to be trained to read students’ work holistically. This means that beyond the formatting, styles, conventions, and organization, perhaps attention and score should also be given to the genre, intention, and the sociocultural contexts of the writings as well. To pinpoint the criteria of ‘voice’ we should look for in students’ writing, Hyland (2008 cited in Zhao, 2013) propose an interactional model of voice, in which the author’s stance (uses of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention) and the audience’s engagement (mention to reader, personal asides, knowledge reference, directives, and questions) must appear in writings. To further this new idea of writing assessment, Zhao (2013) extended the notions of giving importance to ‘voice’ in the written text by inventing separated analytical rubrics which include these criteria: the presence and clarity of ideas in the content, the manner of presentation of ideas, and the writers and reader presence. Granted that her study was conducted in an argumentative writing class, I do feel that what she has found will benefit many teachers who are seeking a framework of how to assess the students’ voice. Although in order to succeed in the academic world, getting good scores on a standardized writing test are crucial, but it does not mean that we have to rob students of their voice completely. Nonetheless, as we teach our students, we cannot help but notice that they are placing their attention on things that will not actually help them to be good writers. I believe that to be a great writer, how perfect your grammar or spellings and how well you organize your well-research contented are not the only things that matter. Good writers are those who are creative and bold enough to add that ‘flair,’ that strong signature we knew as ‘voice.’ Therefore, it is vital that we add ‘voice’ in our teaching writing repertoire today. ________________________________________ References Brimi, H. (2012). Teaching Writing in the Shadow of Standardized Writing Assessment: An Exploratory Study. American Secondary Education, 41(1), 52-77. Kesler, T. (2012). Writing With Voice. Reading Teacher, 66(1), 25-29. O'Connor, J. S. (2012). Style over Substance. Schools: Studies In Education, 9(1), 47-62. Zhao, C. (2013). Measuring Authorial Voice Strength in L2 Argumentative Writing: The Development and Validation of an Analytic Rubric. Language Testing, 30(2), 201-230.