CHAPTER 9
Evaluating Student Writing Through a Functional Focus on Language
This chapter discusses the limitations of currently popular tools for writing assessment and proposes an alternative method based in functional linguistics. It describes how functional grammar analysis can be used to evaluate student writing in different genres in a way that helps teachers render a more objective judgment of writing quality based on tangible linguistic evidence (rather than intuition or personal preferences), generate specific information about the strengths and weaknesses of student writing, and design focused instruction or intervention that enhances students' linguistic awareness, expands their linguistic repertoire, addresses their writing needs, and improves their writing proficiency.