Changing Teachers` Attitude Towards Writing, Teaching Of Writing And Assessment Of Writing

Abstract

Writing is the most visible and probably therefore the most criticized product of education, but often the teacher has not declared to him/her what is the essence of writing and what are the main goals of teaching and assessing writing. Usually, when teachers in Estonia claim about students` bad writing skills, they often mean spelling, which is actually only one element of writing. The present article is going to introduce the research, which goal was to convince teachers, that creating text is a complex process, which involves paying attention to numerous factors: choice of words, syntax, message, peculiarities of different text forms, language usage etc. Therefore analytical assessment is described more closely in named above research paper and in this article, with hoping to encourage teachers to use it more systematically and consciously. Analytical assessment model, worked out for the research and used for assessing 740 pupils written texts, gave complex information about pupils writing skills, from what brief overview will be presented in the current article. The fact, that all pupils had their strong sides and weaknesses, confirmed complex nature of writing and proved, that for assessing pupils writing skills we need to assess many aspects of writing, not only spelling and/or content.