Assessing EFL Writing: Meaningful Innovations through SFL

Abstract

The need for clear assessment criteria for learners has been widely recognized in English language education in Japan (Nekoda, Nekoda, & Miura, 2004). This issue is particularly critical for Japanese EFL writing instruction, which, previously dominated by a focus on sentence-level translation, is shifting towards beyond-the-sentence-level writing for communication, commonly called “free composition” in Japan (Yamanishi, 2005). However the spread of free composition has been met with growing concern amongst teachers and confusion amongst learners. A nation-wide survey by the National Institute for Educational Policy Research clearly shows that in Japanese EFL writing classrooms, teachers face considerable difficulty teaching free composition, with painfully little progress being made in their students’ writing (National Institute for Educational Policy Research, 2007). One of the causes is a lack of clear criteria for assessing Japanese EFL learners’ written language.