Traditionally, when evaluating students’ writing levels, the “evaluators” silently read the essays in their offices, oftentimes fill out a rubric and come up with a score. Most of us would agree that such a process is onerous and often results in students being misplaced.

The method that I’ll describe here has important benefits for teachers and the ESL program as a whole. I’ve used this in several ESL programs for two situations:  (1) determining which students should be promoted to the next level at the end of a term, and (2) placement of new students. It’s especially helpful for determining the proper Writing-class level of borderline students, in other words, ones whose writing levels are not obvious.

To demonstrate how the method works, let’s look at those two situations.

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This posting is directed specifically to teachers in these categories:

• You have experience teaching ESL Writing, but you have been assigned to teach a new level.
• You have just been hired to teach in an ESL program and are assigned a Writing class.
• You have been teaching an ESL Writing class for a few terms, but this term you have some students who have “unusual” writing characteristics.

Imagine that it’s the third week of the term. You just picked up your students’ first writing sample (e.g. a paragraph or essay) and are starting to mark/evaluate them. (See Most Effective Technique for Marking Grammar on Essays to Develop Self-Editing Skills)

You start with Adey’s essay and soon some questions come to your mind:

• Most of his sentences are simple starting with Subject + Verb, but his basic grammar is clean. Is that acceptable at this level? Should you expect him to use more subordination? (See Is the Hokey Pokey Really What It’s All About?  No, Subordination Is.  (Part 1) about subordination) What will teachers at the next level expect?

Next, you read Naomi’s essay and wonder about this:

• She uses complex sentences, but sometimes her grammar breaks down, especially word forms. Would these kinds of mistakes disqualify her from passing to the next level? How “perfect” must a students’ grammar be to pass?

Another student, Dante had this characteristic:

• His ideas seemed quite simplistic; he doesn’t develop them with enough details. What is the expectation for students passing to the next level concerning idea development?

Help is on the way!

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This post is related to the previous post: This Process Contains Huge Benefits For Writing Teachers, Students and Programs.

Here is how you can make your Writing class students’ and fellow Writing-Course colleagues feel satisfied at the end of a term. And here is how you can save yourself a large amount of time, energy and reduce stress.

The final class of the term has just finished. You look at your Level 4 Writing class roster and choose which students whom you are not sure if they have the writing skills necessary to be successful at the next level. Let’s say that out of your 16 students, six are in this “borderline” category. (You are confident in your decision to pass the other eight students and fail two.) You organize a file with writing samples for each of these six students.¹ You give this file to the teacher at the next level, Level 5. That teacher reads your six students’ writings, and the next day meets with you. She tells you that she is confident that three of the students look ready for Level 5. You spend  about 15-20 minutes talking about the other three students, reading parts of their essays together (sometime aloud) and analyzing their work.²  For students whom you both are still unsure about, you can look at more samples of their writing.  In the end, the two of you decide one of them could pass and two should repeat Level 4. You feel assured that your students will be in the right level the next term and that you can explain to any student who might wonder why they failed what they need to work on in order to pass the next term. ³