9.5 Using Assessment to Inform Instruction

9.5 Using Assessment to Inform Instruction

The most important goal of any assessment is to improve student learning and performance. A functional linguistics approach to writing assessment helps us identify the language patterns related to content, logic, organization, and style/perspective, giving us valuable insights into what makes a piece of writing more or less successful, effective, or valued. Although only one or two aspects of the grammar was targeted in each analysis of content, logic, organization, and style/perspective, it is important to note that additional analysis often yields convergent or complementary results, as language is an interlocking system of grammatical choices, with choices in one grammatical system often (albeit not always) affecting choices in other grammatical systems.

For example, with respect to the two pieces of informational writing (Text 9-1 and Text 9-2), transitivity analysis focusing on process types and participants reveals that Text 9-2 construes more specialized content that classifies fish and attributes qualities to it, whereas Text 9-1 construes more commonsense content that describes a sequence of actions involving crocodiles. Analysis of Theme/Rheme, nouns, and other word choices shows that Text 9-2 features a formal, objective, academic style of writing; whereas Text 9-1 takes on a more interactional, informal style of writing. Analysis of Theme/Rheme and process types indicates that Text 9-2 has an organization structure that facilitates the presentation of information and the development of discursive flow, whereas the information in Text 9-1 is presented in a haphazard manner without any logical sequence.

With respect to the sample reading response (Text 9-3), analysis of process types reveals that the essay focuses on expressing personal feelings and reflecting on the overarching themes of the story, rather than on retelling story events or describing story characters. Analysis of logical-semantic relations indicates that the narrative content of the response is expanded primarily through the logic of elaboration that explains points of view, clarifies statements, and answers questions. Analysis of appraisal resources suggests that the main preoccupation of the response is evaluating the overall thematic significance of the story, instead of representing the student writer's emotional reactions to the story or describing story characters' feelings. Finally, analysis of clause-level Themes and Rhemes shows that the sample response appraises the story as whole (instead of particular events or characters in the story), but the evaluation fails to sustain its focus because of constant shifts among multiple Themes. On the basis of the linguistic evidence generated from these analyses, we are then able to determine with some degree of certainty and objectivity the overall quality of Text 9-1, Text 9-2, and Text 9-3. This is different from quantitative assessments, which issue an omnibus score on writing quality that has little instructional value for teachers. It also differs from the traditional rubric-based assessment, where criteria lack specificity and teachers render judgment on student writing with little concrete linguistic evidence.

Knowing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a piece of writing is a prerequisite for designing effective instruction that accentuates students' strengths and addresses their needs. Teachers who use the rubric-based evaluation may rate Text 9-3 as a response of decent quality but will likely have trouble generating the linguistic evidence to justify the rating. Similarly, teachers may intuitively judge Text 9-1 as nontechnical, unorganized, unscientific, and non-academic, but they often are not able to pinpoint the exact sources of the failure (e.g., what is it about the organization of the text that is not "focused" or "effectively organized in logical and creative manner" and in what way does the text demonstrate a lack of "high degree of craftsmanship") and have few concrete things to say about how the text can be improved.

By contrast, a functional linguistics approach offers teachers tools for understanding how a text is more or less successful/effective, enabling them to identify linguistic issues that can be the focus of subsequent instruction or remediation. For example, although Text 9-3 shows that the student is able to make generalizations about the story, it would benefit from further revision that enhances its evaluative focus, formality, structure, style, and discursive flow throughout the entire response. Such revision can draw on the concepts of Theme, voice, and modality. The student can be shown, for example, (a) how discursive flow can be facilitated through patterns of ThemeRheme progression (e.g., repetition, zig-zagging, mixed), (b) how impersonal passive voice helps bury agency, sharpen focus, create cohesion, establish less involvement between the writer and the reader, and instill a sense of formality, and (c) how caution can be exercised through the use of hedging devices such as modals to moderate assertions and temper reactions. Explicit discussions such as these can increase the student's language awareness and help her fashion reading responses in ways that meet teachers' expectations.(https://www.daowen.com)

Similarly, Text 9-1 shows that the student writer is quite knowledgeable about crocodiles, but that knowledge is presented in commonsense language patterns, which are typically not valued in academic writing. Furthermore, he has a working knowledge of some basic features of the report genre (e.g., use of generic nouns and timeless verbs), but is potentially unaware of other context-sensitive discursive features (e.g., density, technicality, abstraction) that he is expected to demonstrate in writing. He also knows quite a few facts about crocodiles, but these facts are constructed in language patterns that approximate those of everyday spontaneous speech. Drawing on the functional grammar analysis strategies illustrated above, teachers can design lessons that give the student insights into (a) how the use of linking verbs (relational processes) enables the author to develop general statements that define, classify, or characterize things, (b) how nouns of varying complexities— particularly technical nouns, nominalizations, and expanded noun phrases— contribute to the construction of technical, abstract, and dense content, (c) how Theme choices impact the development of information flow and the organization of the text, and (d) how different language choices (e.g., verbs, nouns, pronouns, vocabulary, Themes) affect the style of writing. These lessons can be made an integral part of the reading or writing workshop, where the student engages in reading/writing authentic texts and in comparing what he has written with texts in the same genre written by experts. Such targeted instruction is more likely to heighten the student's awareness of the role grammar plays in crafting a text, enabling him to more successfully meet disciplinary expectations for language use in school-based tasks such as writing a science report. It is important to keep in mind that improving a piece of writing requires multiple revisions and takes time. This means teachers need to have patience (besides knowledge) when working with students to improve the quality of their writing.

It is not the intent of this chapter to suggest that teachers do frequency counts of every linguistic feature when evaluating student writing. This is neither necessary nor feasible in actual practice. The purpose in quantifying the linguistic variables here is to illuminate the power of functional grammar analysis in differentiating text quality. What the SFL-informed assessment framework calls for is that teachers move beyond a rubric-ese mentality or an obsession with numbers to focus instead on equipping themselves with deep knowledge about how language works in different genres/registers and disciplines and then using that knowledge to guide them in (a) identifying the most salient and relevant grammatical features for evaluating a particular type of text, (b) generating systematic linguistic evidence that supports whatever judgment they render on the text, and (c) planning subsequent instruction or remediation that addresses student needs. The point of the foregoing linguistic excursion is to demonstrate the potential of explicit knowledge about language/grammar for a better understanding and articulation of students' discursive competence so that more informed pedagogical decisions can be made about how to improve student writing. As Myhill (2010, p. 144) wrote,

Understanding the difficulties children face in learning how to create and shape meaning in written form is supportive knowledge for informing decision-making about teaching strategies and content. Equally, being able to recognize the way different linguistic characteristics in writing contribute to their success, …, can inform formative assessment in precise and purposeful ways, which can move beyond impressionistic judgments to explicit articulation of writers' development needs.