Assessing the English Language Writing of Chinese Learners of English

This book focuses on the assessment of English language writing in China mainland, the territories of Hong Kong and Macau, and Taiwan. The first part of the book describes how writing in English has been assessed in Chinese contexts in the past 25 years, and how it continues to be assessed at present. The second part of the book presents reports of work such as formative classroom-based assessment, feedback-based or feedback-led approaches, learning-oriented assessment, portfolios, as well as the important issue of teacher professional development in writing assessment. This two-part division relates to and reflects what has been happening in writing assessment internationally, in the UK from the 1940s, and in the US in the past 25 years.

The use of English for international business communication, for international political negotiations and its rapidly increasing use as a medium of instruction in some subject areas has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Chinese L1 speakers who are learning and being assessed in English. This is often done with an emphasis on reading and writing.  The vast majority of assessments of English language writing are done through large-scale direct testing that uses simple prompts/tasks and short writing samples. This book explores best practices in assessing the writing in English of native speakers of Chinese.

Liz Hamp-Lyons began her career as a teacher of English for Academic Purposes, before researching the writing test component of ELTS (the precursor to the IELTS) for her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Much of her PhD was published, with other chapters, in Assessing Second Language Writing in Academic Contexts (1991). She worked at the Universities of Michigan and Colorado before becoming Chair Professor and Department Head at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. For many years she edited the journal Assessing Writing (Elsevier), and founded the Journal of English for Academic Purposes in 2002. She has consulted on large scale as well as more local writing assessments.