Written Language Assessment

Assessments of written language are used to gauge language and writing development for various formative and summative purposes. They have an important role in educational research, measurement, and evaluation, as they provide information about language and literacy development via analysis of writers’ use of language through performance. Moreover, analysis of written language is important in teaching language and literacy as well as in researching linguistic development and differences across writers, learners, and languages.

The assessment of written language falls into the category of performance-based assessment, wherein test takers respond in written form to prompts. For example, a written language assessment might prompt a test taker to compose a short story about a picture or to summarize content from a text the test taker has read. These ...