EVALUATING THE USE OF RUBRICS: A METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE IN WRITING CLASSES

Аннотация

The current article discusses some effectiveness and priorities in writing classes in teaching English language. The article covers ample theoretical data on rubrics of writing assessment and practical experiment done in language university of Uzbekistan covering language and literature teacher. The study aims to focus more comprehension of writing pieces and task fulfillment of student by means of writing rubrics. Keywords: rubrics, writing task, feedback, judgement, assessment criteria. Introduction. One of the most important aspects of the job of an English teacher is giving students the feedback and corrections they need to improve as second language learners. This is especially true for written English. In writing classes, the process of providing feedback to students on their writing takes-up significant amounts of time and effort both inside and outside of the classroom. In order to streamline the feedback process teachers often make use of tools, such as rubrics, to help them provide their students with feedback. Traditionally rubrics have been seen as tools that have the potential of “increased consistency of scoring, the possibility to facilitate valid judgment of complex competencies, and promotion of learning ”[2]. In the field of first language composition whether or not the rubric is an effective tool in providing students with the feedback that they need to improve as writers is a topic of debate in a variety of academic journals. Researchers have come out both in support of (H. G. Andrade, 2000; H. L. Andrade, Wang, Du, & Akawi, 2009) or against (Broad, 2000; Kohn, 2006; Wilson, 2007) the use of rubrics as a means of providing students feedback about their written work. Literature review. Essay writing for literature courses remains a problem for students and teachers alike. While most of EFL students have had writing experience, it is important for them to realize that academic writing for a literature domain at university level is different from the practices they have so far encountered. A potential drawback of this viewpoint is the lack of a perspective on how lecturers may take students’ experience in the academic world into account, and how this concern may play out in their responses to students’ academic outcomes. Thus, a set of writing rubrics (referred to hereafter as META) were designed in the research reported here to scaffold EFL English majors’ academic writing in literature classes. META focuses on four key elements of academic writing, that is, mechanics, use of evidence, presentation of the thesis/claim, and analysis [4]. Andrade (2000) defines a rubric as “a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work” and one which “articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor” [1]. Research by Schafer, Swanson, Bené, and Newberry (2001) offers indirect support to the view of students as users of assessments. They speculate that the higher test scores are the result of 133 ILM-FAN VA INNOVATSIYA ILMIY-AMALIY KONFERENSIYASI in-academy.uz/index.php/si teachers incorporating operational definitions of achievement into their instruction in ways that were understood and used by students [7]. This suggests that if carefully designed, rubrics can help students in goal- setting and planning. These are metacognitive strategies which support their learning and at the same time, can help them understand the goal of an assignment and support teachers in unbiased grading, giving feedback and assigning more challenging work to students [1,2]. Thus, rubrics have the potential to help students develop understanding and skills, as well as make dependable judgments about the quality of their own works beyond traditional testing [2]. Rubrics were first proposed as a tool to analyze writing in 1912 when Noyes suggested the use of a rubric as a means of standardizing the evaluation of student compositions: “Our present methods of measuring compositions are controlled too much by personal opinion, which varies with the individual. What is wanted is a clear-cut, concrete standard of measurement which will mean the same thing to all people in all places and is not dependent upon the opinion of any individual” [5] . Of these scales the most famous is the Hillegas scale, which was developed in 1912 and “gave English teachers the first reliable means of estimating objectively the quality of their pupils’ written production”. In 1915 Thorndike improved upon Hillegas rubric for grading student compositions by “substituting new specimens for certain of the original samples and by including several examples in the steps at or near the middle of the scale” [6]. Methodology. " Writing is vital to students’ achievement in school, the working environment, and society at large" [8]. Since the voices of all educators and students ought to be valued, particularly in the zone of evaluating students’ writing, this study investigates the perspectives of EFL instructors toward rubrics t