Direct Writing Assessment as a basis for Teaching and Learning in ESL Classrooms in Malaysian Secondary Schools

It is very important for ESL teachers to teach and provide feedback about their students’ performances in directed writing, summary writing and essay writing, which are given in the secondary school exit examination in Malaysia. This paper looks into how three ESL teachers assessed essay writing after teaching their students to write. An observation of how these teachers gave feedback to their students after assessing their writing was conducted. Each of the teachers was given one of these scoring methods to assess their students’ writing: holistic scoring method, analytic scoring method and primary trait scoring method. It was found that each scoring method provided a different basis for giving feedback to the students. This is because each scoring method looks at different aspects of the students’ writing performance. This paper discusses the differences found in the feedback lessons given by these three ESL teachers.