The effectiveness of writing tests in teaching english

Chapter I. The importance of writing in language teaching

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   Impact of writing skills on the development of language competence
   

Writing skills in language learning are often overlooked. Many language learners concentrate much more on skills such as speaking or listening. However, not racticing and developing your ability to write in your target language is potentially slowing your progress.
Writing seems to be less important as people feel they don’t have to do that much writing in their daily life. And when they do, there are all sorts of spellcheckers and other types of editing software people rely on to produce good writing in any language.
The truth is, writing skills are more important than can seem on the surface, and every language learner needs to develop them. Even if you’re not learning your target language for academic purposes it’s vital that you work on your ability to write. Similarly, if you believe that you won’t do a lot of writing in the future, do not underestimate the benefits of developing and racticing your writing skills.
Writing competence refers to the ability to write a good composition which meets the following criteria: (a) Purpose and clarity, the degree to which the students has demonstrated an understanding of the position taken in the article and has established a reasoned response and critical interpretation, (b) Organization, the degree to which the student has produced a unified and coherent composition, (c) Specificity and evidence, the degree to which specific evidence from the article is documented, integrated, and used to support arguments in the student’s writing; the degree to which counter arguments are supported through evidence, and (d) Usage, mechanic, and grammar, the degree to which the student has exhibited corrected usage (tense, word choice), spelling, punctuation, and grammar. In my opinion, this writing competence is much closely deal with writing process, that is knowledge of the most appropriate way of preparing for a writing task. If writer knows what to write in a given context, what the reader expects the text to look like, which parts of the language system are relevant to the particular task in hand, and has a command of writing skills appropriate to this task, then they have a good chance of writing something that will be effective (Tribble, 1996). In addition, taking good care during writing process will determine the quality of the result of the writing. Writing process involves cyclic writing activities which move learners from generation of ideas and the collection of data through to the publication of a finished text. According to Gebhard (1996) there are two model of writing process, linier and recursive. Linier process is the simplification of way of thinking, starting from pre-writing, composing, revising and editing as steps that go on one direction process. The writer does not go back to the earlier steps in producing the writing. In reality, the process is not that straight, but recursive meaning that we go through a process of creating and recreating the piece of writing until we discover and clarify within ourselves what it is that we want to say and until we are able to express this meaning in a clear way. In other words, at any point in the preparation of the text, writer can loop backwards or forwards to whichever of the activities involved in the text composition he finds useful.

Diagram 1. Linear and recursive model of writing process Gebhard (1996)
During prewriting stage, writer is specifying the task, planning and outlining, collecting data and making notes. During revising, the writer is reorganizing, shifting emphasis and focusing information and style for the readership, while during editing phase, the writer is checking grammar, lexis, surface features such as punctuation, spelling, layout, quotations, references.
We can see that each competence has its own particular role in producing a piece of writing. Language competence, which concerns more with linguistic elements of language, together with writing competence and cultural competence especially the knowledge of genre plays very important role in producing a piece of writing. The contribution of each element of language competence and writing competence can be summarized in the following diagram 2:

As we can see in Diagram 2, a good piece of writing which is basically representation of clear, fluent, and effective communication of ideas is very much influenced by many elements that can be broadly categorized into three, namely language competence, writing competence.
From the diagram, it is obvious that elements such as syntax, grammar, and word choice belong to language competence. While the elements that belong to the writing competence are those like the writer’s process, content, mechanic and organization. The rest which includes audience, purpose as well as content are elements which belong to cultural competence. The mastery of each of these elements is basic in writing. Therefore, teacher must know these elements and apply them in their practice of teaching writing to his/her students. These elements are equally important and interdependent in contributing to the production of a good piece of writing.

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