Comparing Writing Skills in Different Languages Using the Same Scalee

A unique and novel writing assessment has been developed: it is the first in the world to successfully assess writing across languages and scripts in multiple countries with diverse (including lesser taught) languages. The assessment uses common tasks and common scoring criteria, and reports student achievement on a single scale across the multiple countries and languages.

The metric has been developed to survey South East Asian students at a key transition point in their education , the last year of primary schooling, across seven countries in South East Asia.

This paper reports on the framework design, the test development process and the recent results of the Field Trial (15,392 cases) as the main study moves into development in 2019. The socio-political context is described and challenges in developing the language assessments for specific contexts are briefly discussed.

The assessment framework features a literacy orientation, targeting authentic writing life skills, from single word labelling through to freer descriptive writing. Each task is coded using multiple criteria (between two and six criteria, depending on the task). Because of the innovative nature of the Writing component, as a cross-language assessment, it was hypothesised that some features of writing would be assessable across languages whereas others might be language dependent. Field trial data confirming our hypotheses will be discussed.

This heralds a major and exciting transition in language assessment, where practitioners might reconsider the assessment of unrelated languages using a single scale.