Given that nowadays writing skill is included in main standardised tests worldwide as well as nationwide, as writing assessment is employed as a part of performance assessment in classroom testing at high school level in Korea, English teachers are fi...
Given that nowadays writing skill is included in main standardised tests worldwide as well as nationwide, as writing assessment is employed as a part of performance assessment in classroom testing at high school level in Korea, English teachers are first expected to establish the construct of writing ability explicitly prior to devising other test-related aspects such as test specifications, tasks and scoring/grading schemes for the sake of validity of the testing. The definition of writing ability can be formed depending on teachers` own experience as teachers and philosophy of writing, taken into consideration characteristics of learners and aims of pedagogy in a given context. It may also be formed according to pedagogical approaches to the teaching of writing which each teacher adopts. This study, therefore, aims at exploring the definitions of writing ability according to three approaches to the teaching of writing (product-based, process-based and reader/genre-based) and examining whether English teachers at high school level in Korea have established their own but theoretical definitions of writing ability and what they look like, and making suggestions on ways to help them with this issue. For this study, six English teachers participated in the interview as respondents and their answers were discussed qualitatively. Even though this study has limitations of generalizing the findings from the small number of participants, it shows that there are ways to help them have their own concrete construct of writing ability before they establish and administer valid and consistent assessment scheme.