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Questionnaire

Testing Writing

(e) What do you look for?
This last section of the questionnaire tried to find out what features of writing were important from the teachers’ point of view. Many of the criteria listed were marked ‘very important’ by above 90% of the teachers.  Only 2% have said that they assign marks keeping in mind the ‘overall impression’ of the written work.  To cross check this information, when an analysis of learners’ class work notebooks were undertaken, in all the notebooks, no errors were marked and just one single score was assigned out of a total of ten marks (Appendix 4 a, b, c).

The criteria listed in the questionnaire included:

correct punctuation marks

coherence and use of linking words

appropriate word choice

sentence construction

legibility and neatness

grammatical correctness

style of writing

overall impression

natural use of language

use of language appropriate to the content

Any other (please specify)

Though the teachers marked all the criteria as very important, in actual practice the written work of the students were passages copied from the textbook with many errors. The errors were not marked by the teachers and some of the students who had committed more errors got 8 out of 10 and some who had made less errors got 6 out of 10.

The students' composition notebooks indicated that the teachers cared more for neatness of copying than any other criteria.