9.6 Conclusion

Popular assessment tools in writing, such as rubrics or quantitative measures, often lack clarity and specificity. In order to make assessment effective and useful, there is a great need to precisely and clearly describe genre/register/discipline-specific linguistic resources associated with each of the assessment criteria created for the assigned task (O'Halloran & Schleppegrell, 2016). A functional linguistics approach (FLA) satisfies this demand. It promotes a functional focus on language in writing assessment, emphasizes the intrinsic connection between language and content, encourages teachers to make explicit the specific linguistic requirements expected of students in academic writing tasks, and helps students see how their language choices construct more or less valued/effective texts.

In academic writing, students are expected to write in certain ways. These expectations call for the use of different constellations of lexicogrammatical choices across different disciplines, tasks, genres, and registers. A functional linguistics approach to assessment enables teachers to examine whether or not students meet these expectations in their writing. It overcomes the limitations of existing assessment tools, generates specific information about the strengths and weaknesses of student writing, and enables teachers to design focused instruction or intervention that increases students' linguistic awareness, expands their linguistic repertoire, addresses their writing needs, and improves their writing proficiency.(https://www.daowen.com)