Asian Association for Language Assessment

Summary writing, an activity to succinctly represent the gist of a source material(s) in writing, is a task that second-language (L2) learners frequently encounter in the academic domain. While building academic reading and writing skills for summarization is essential in preparing students for English medium instruction, doing so in L2 academic writing courses is often challenging due to the complex interplay of multiple linguistic skills involved in summarization. This suggests the critical importance of the provision of fine-grained feedback to learners, as discussed by previous L2 assessment researchers from various perspectives (e.g., Alderson, 2005; Doe, 2015; Jang & Wagner, 2013; Kunnan & Jang, 2009; Lantolf & Poehner, 2011; Turner & Purpura, 2016). Such performance feedback could help learners understand assessment criteria, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as steps required to achieve their learning goals.

  In this session, the presenter will provide an overview of an online module for formative assessment of summary writing performance currently being developed for university-level academic writing instruction in Japan. In this module, students learn strategies for summary writing and assessment criteria, practice writing summaries with scaffolding, engage in self- and peer assessment, and receive various types of performance feedback while and after completing summary writing tasks. This session focuses specifically on results of a pilot study of this module, which explored stakeholder perceptions of the appropriateness of the feedback to be presented to the learner as a score report upon completion of a summary writing task. The presenter will first discuss the design principles of this formative assessment tool from the perspectives of Bachman and Palmer’s (2010) Assessment Use Argument (AUA) and learning-oriented assessment (LOA; Purpura & Turner, 2019; Turner & Purpura, 2016). Results of preliminary quantitative and qualitative analyses of pilot study data from 107 undergraduate students and six instructors in an academic writing course at a private university in Tokyo will then be presented with a focus on these key stakeholder groups’ views on the clarity and usefulness of the feedback on student summary writing performance. Results of this study will be discussed in relation to ways in which such performance feedback could be utilized to promote learning in L2 academic writing courses as well as future research directions for exploring how actionable performance feedback could be designed for formative purposes.